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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at|http : //books . google . com/| ■ I II 1 1 1 1 1 \n II I It II til ij I M 1,1 ! ni.iiwitg I iiiiHiimiHiiii THE C11FT or I ^ ll!WiliMiiihiiirti||iiilililiTiinfi»ililfllillllllllll^^ ad JESUS CHRIST: HIS TIMES, LIFE, AND WORK. 30! ■^■7 Waxhi Irs ^1^ ^^^^ ^viiou Second Edition. A STUDY OF ORIGINS; Or, The Problems of Knowledsre, of Beinsr* and of Duty. CrowH Bvo, cloikj gs. CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS. Including: an Essay on Thiers from Personal Recollections, and Sketches of Dupanloup, Amaud de I'Ari^ge, Vinet, Adolphe Monod, Veroey, Strauss, eta Crown Bvo, cicik, js. td, THE EARLY YEARS OF CHRISTIANITY A ComprehensiTe History of the First Three Centuries of the Christian Church. In Four Volumes, comprising : — I. Tub Apostolic Agb op Christianity. II. The Martyrs and Apologists. III. Hbrbsy and Christian Doctrinb. IV. LiFB AND PrACTICB IN THB EaRLY ChURCH. Fi/ih Edition. Crown Zvo^ clffihy each, 7*. 6d, London : HODDER & STOUGHTON, a;, Patbrnoster Row. HIS JESUS CHRIST: TIMES, LIFE, AND WORK. r BY E.'De PRESSENS6, D.D., Author of •' The Early Vearj cf Christianity r " A Study ofOrighu;* ttc. TRANSLATED FROM THE FREMCH BY ANNIE HARWOOD HOLMDEN • * % . ^ EIGHTH EDITION. HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXXV11. \All rights reserved,\ * • • • . • • • Printed by HaieU, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. PREFACE. This book is not the result of any particular circumstances, nor is it an answer to any contemporary work which has left its impress on the mind of our age. It forms a natural part of my series of works on primitive Christianity. It was always my intention to write it. If I have entered on the great undertaking sooner than I had purposed, it has been in obedience to the imperative call of our day. The religious question, and more especially the question — " What think ye of Christ ? " has come before our times with a directness which reminds us of the sixteenth century. I do not hesi- tate to admit how much the recent work of one of the most brilliant spirits of our age has contributed to this revival of interest. I said, candidly, what I thought of that work on its first appearance. I retract nothing from the judgment I then formed of M. Renan*s **Viede J6su;" but it would be impossible to deny that his book has given an impetus to thought, and fired the public mind with an enthusiasm for questions which twenty years ago would assuredly have been pronounced superannuated. Let it be freely granted that this immense success, indicat- ing as it does amongst us a great ignorance of the essential character of Christianity and of religion in general, carries a severe lesson to the defenders of the Gospel. Why have they lefit it to their adversaries to bring Christ near to man, by representing Him in the historical setting of His age 7 No VI PKEFACK. doubt, under pretext of restoring to Him His human character, these have deprived Him of His divinity and His sanctity. But He had been too often presented as an abstract dogma; here we have only exaggeration carried to the opposite ex- treme, and a romantic fiction substituted for a theological treatise. Let it be our endeavour to arrive at the true history, by transporting ourselves to the Judaea of the times of the Herods — that troubled epoch when so much good blended with so much evil, and so many pious aspirations clashed with low ambitions. Upon this background of real human life, the divine and holy beauty of the Redeemer shines forth more gloriously than from the golden nimbus which encircles the passionless face of the conventional Christ. Too often the manhood of Jesus has been entirely sacri- ficed to His Godhead ; divines have forgotten that the latter is inseparable from the former, and the Saviour-Christ is not God hidden in a human form, but God made man — ^the Son of God humbled and become obedient, in the bold language of St. Paul — a Christ who veritably submitted Himself to all the conditions of human life. From this point of view alone is it possible to attempt a history of Jesus. I venture to hope that it will be found to harmonise, both in the minds of my readers and my own, with that entire faith in His Divinity which has been the universal belief of Christians for eighteen centuries. It may, perhaps, be asked — **^ What end is to be gained by a new history of Christ ? Have we not the Gospels ? What can be added to those incomparable narratives, so vivid and artless, the pure and transparent mirror in which the image of Jesus is reflected in all its gentleness and majesty? Is it not enough for us to have, as an historian, John, the friend and brother of the Master whom he wor- shipped ? " None can be more ready than I to recognise the inestimable value of this primitive testimony — that which PRSFACB, vii is authoritative, that which alone bears the impress of the creative age of the Church. Those who have themselves attempted to depict the life of Jesus, are most prepared to appreciate the unique worth of the Gospels, and count them* selves happy in being able to turn from all the imperfections of their rough delineation, to those inspired painters who reached the climax of art without any artistic methods, and whose perfect simplicity brings us into direct contact with the living Saviour. And yet, I believe that there is a use in taking up after them, and under their authority, a subject on which they are for ever our masters. For, in the first place, the attacks made on Christianity vary from time to time ; and we are therefore constrained to reconquer, again and again, the disputed ground from the enemy. Now the Gospel history has been one of the points most strongly assailed, especially since the rise of criticism. Then, we must not forget that the first histo- rians of Jesus addressed themselves to readers who were their contemporaries, and who were perfectly acquainted with the scenes and circumstances amidst which Christ lived, with the condition of His country, and the character of His age A few brief indications in their writings sufficed to enable Jews and Romans to represent to them- selves, not only the drama of the Gospel history, but also the theatre in which it was enacted. This acquaintance is absolutely necessary in order to give anything more than a vague and abstract idea of the ministry and work of Jesus. It is evident that what was then understood intuitively can now be grasped only by a vigorous effort of mind. Know- ledge is indispensable to restore colour to the past, because it alone enables us to re-ascend the stream of time, and make ourselves, in a manner, witnesses of the events. Lastly, as Christ is above all the ages, no single century can exhaust the riches of truth which are in Him. Every period discloses some new motive for love and adoration. VWl PREFACE. * It is not that any age can go beyond the Gospel ; for it contains all that we can ever know of Jesus ; but it is like the treasury in the parable, from which the householder brings forth new things after the old. Our conflicts, our griefsy our efforts, disclose to us truths hitherto unexplored, though standing in close connection with those previously known. It is thus that the office of evangelist is perpetu- ated in the Church, and that each new generation relates the old story of redemption from its own point of view, with its own peculiar bias and experience. Thus the ages repeat, each in its own tongue, " the wonderful works of God." Christian art has never been weary of reproducing the scenes of Gospel history ; the subject is ever the same, but it lives again in the freshness of its youth, as the painter touches, with his luminous pencil, one or another portion of his canvas. Thus is it with the successive historians of Jesus. We are free, then, to repeat the attempt of those who have gone before us ; and our successors will have the same right, or rather, will be bound by the same duty, on the sole condition that the Gospel remains for all and for ever the touchstone of truth and the sovereign authority. The plan of my book is simple. I have first treated the preliminary questions which hold the approaches to the subject. Is it true that the cause of the supernatural is, as asserted, a lost cause ? Is there no escape from the neces- sity of mutilating, from the very outset, a history which loses its proper character as soon as it is divested of the idea of a sovereign God, capable of interposing in our destinies by unforeseen acts ? I have endeavoured to set reasonable arguments against the peremptory affirmations which are the weapons used in our day by the adversaries of the supernatural. MM. Renan and Strauss, and all the disciples of the TObingen school, deny to Christianity any character of originality; according to their version, it is PREFACB. ix the offspring of the wedded genius of Greece and the East. I have set aside this theory by a rapid glance over the religions which preceded the Gospel. I have drawn a pic- ture as complete as I could make it of the Judaism of the Decline in Palestine and in Egypt, and I hope to have established that Jesus, so far from drawing His doctrine from the schools of Jerusalem or from the transmitted in- fluences of Alexandria, was the living contradiction of all that surrounded Him. The importance of such a result, ii it is really attained, cannot be misconceived. The preliminary questions are brought to a close with the chapter entitled ^' The Gospels." It is very essential to vindicate against contemporary criticism, the credibility of the documents from which we draw the history of Jesus. This is the only means of laying a sure foundation of the building. Are we dealing with legend or history ? this is the grand question. In the succeeding books, I have endeavoured to unfold the life of Jesus, without much discursion from the thread oi the narrative, referring disputed points to cursory notes; further than this, I have not paused in my history to take any account of the disputations of the schools. After treat- ing the events which belong to the period preceding the entrance of Jesus on His public ministry, — the penod in- cluding His infancy. His temptation in the wilderness, and His relations with John the Baptist, — I proceed to give an outline of His plan, His teaching, and His miracles, before entering on the consecutive history of His public ministry The heads of the three books devoted to this part ot the subject will sufficiently indicate their contents ;*— I. The Time of Public Favour, II. The Period of Conflict. III. The Great Week. — Death and Victory. My great aim is net so much to demonstrate any theory, X PREFACE. as to set forth Jesus such as I see Him, such as He appears to me in the Gospels, such as I worship Him ; and to say to my contemporaries — Does this image of Christ seem to you to correspond better with the truth of facts, than those forms under which He has been recently represented to you from the naturalistic point of view ? Is it more in harmony with the psychological laws, which suppose the unity of the moral being ? Have we faithfully observed the principles of the philosophy of history, which refuses to admit effects without a cause, and. to assign as the motive power of the wide and deep revolution which marks the commencement of our era, an intangible myth, a religion without any fixed doctrine, a faith without a God ? It is not for me to reply. I have spared no researches which might make me less unworthy of so great a subject. I have journeyed through Judaea and Galilee, — not that I might garnish my work with lavish descriptions of nature, and merge in the dazzling radiance of the East, that calm and quiet beauty of the Gospel which belongs not to this world, — ^but that I might engrave, as deeply as possible, that seal of reality which is the token of every true history. The reader will find in my book, at least, entire sincerity ; I have not cloaked any of the difficulties I have met ; I have faith- fully given my thought, and my whole thought, without bending to the bias of any school. I am more and more convinced of the necessity of coming into closer contact with the great fact of Christianity. The nineteenth century has as full a right as the sixteenth to go back to the fountain- head of the faith, unhindered by any tradition of men. But this does not preventmy bowing before the everlasting Gospel. It is no slavish submission, it is the act of a free man to acknowledge, on sufficient grounds, a divine authority. I know well how this acceptance of the sublime foolishness of the cross — which is, indeed, the climax of the supernatural — raises a smile of pity on the lips of those who do not be- PRBFACB. ^1 hold in it the wisdom of God and the marvellons response to the deepest needs of man. I only ask of my opponents, not to pronounce, in my case, that judgment without a hear- ing which is so readily awarded to the defenders of the preternatural, and which dispenses with any impartial examination. I appeal, by anticipation, against those sum- mary judgments which are unworthy of science. I demand liberty of thought and conscience for every man. I repudiate all privilege and all coercion, especially in matters of faith. My whole soul yearns for the full consecration of religious liberty, for that absolute severance of the two powers, which shall establish the equality of all beliefs in the eye of the law. I desire, for my own opinions, neither dole nor pro- tection from the civil power; for, in my view, none have more reason to rest content with the common rights in the domain of thought, than enlightened Christians. There is implied weakness in the very semblance of protection. This book has been written in troublous times, when a strong wind is blowing the men of our generation further and farther from my most cherished convictions; it will soon be seen that this icy wind sows seeds of death on its passage, and blasts all on which it blows. Upon the shores towards which it is driving us, we shall find none of the best blessings of life. Liberty, social justice, generous care for the feeble and the fallen, will all be lost on that fatal day when the cause of Christ shall suffer shipwreck; for — for the honour of humanity be it said — this transitory life of earth owes all its grandeur and beauty to that higher world whence man came. Christians hold, as their first article of faith, that this higher worid should be sought after for itself, and that Christ's restoring and elevating work begins with the individual who finds, at His feet alone, peace and a power victorious over evil. They plainly avow that they are not disinterested in this question of religion ; it involves for them all that is worth living for. Thus, while they carefully maintain the individuality of their personal &ith, they combine, ever more and more, in epitc of all that yet divides them, in the defence of their common standard. I have certainly not abandoned my own peculiar beliefs in this apology for the Gospel ; but I have rejoiced to feel the close bond uniting me to the great company of the dis- ciples of Christ in all ages. I have a firm faith in the issue of the crisis. I believe not only in the triumph of Christianity, but in the purifi- cation of the various churches, by the fire of conflict. This is my steadfast hope. My most ardent desire is to con- tribute, in my feeble measure, to dissipate some of the mis- conceptions by which the God-man is veiled from the eyes of my contemporaries. EDMOND DE PRESSENSE. Paris, Nov. 30, 1865. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGB 1 REFACS •• •• •• •• •• •• BOOK I. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. Chapter I. — Of the philosophical and religious bases of the Life of Christ. Of the supernatur^ . . . . z 1. — Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Naturalistic point of view . . . . 5 II. — Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Theistic point of view . • . . 19 — 28 Chapter II. — ^Jesus Christ and the Religions of the Past. 29 I. — Historical glance at ancient Paganism. Asiatic Paganism. Hellenic Paganism. Grecian Philosophy The Greco- Roman World . . . . . . 33-^44 II. — Religion of the Old Testament. Conception of God amongst the Israelites. Idea of evil. Holiness. Divine origin of the Old Testament. Israel separated from other nations. Mosaic institutions. The law. Prophecy .. .. .. .. .. 44—59 Chapter III. — ^The Judaism of the Decline . • . . 60 I. — ^Judaism under the Persians. Temple on Mount Gerizim . . . . . . . . . . 65 — 67 II. — Judaism under the Greeks. Book of Jesus Sirach. Beginnings of Sadduceeism. Beginnings of Pharisa- ism. The Psalter of Solomon . . . . . . 67 — 72 III.— The Maccabees and the Roman Empire. Mensiah a new Maccabeus. Messiah of the Sibylline Oracles. Fresh subjugation of the Jews. The Roman yoke. The Booki of the Maccabees .. .. •• 72—78 %x/ PAGB. lV<-->A]exaadrine Jndatsin. Pfulo. Abiolate contrait be- tween Philo and the GotpeL Hellenistic Jews .. 79—^ V^^Sectt and parties in Jodaea. Essenes. Saddnc Phariftees .. •. 86—89 VI^>Movement of tboa^ in Palestine before the birth of Jesus Christ. Growing importance of the Rabbi. Course of rabbinical studies. Jewish tribanals. Teachings of the Rabbis. Vehemence of Jewish pre- jttdicef , — Incomprehensibility of God. Tendency to place God at a distance from man. Pharisaic morali^ ; its mercenary character. Materialism of the Jewish hopes. Apocalyptic dreams. Book of Enoch. Fourth book of Esdras. Contrast of the Talmad to the GoHpel. Superstitions ideas respecting demons. Political agitators. The indifferent. True Judaism.. 89 — 112 Chaptkr IV,— S-Gcneral proofs of the reality of the Gospel histoiy. Testimony of PHny the Younger. Testimony of Suetonius and of Tacitus. Testimony of Josephus. Testimony of the Talmud. Testimony of the Church. Testimony of the Church of the first century. Cha- racter of the primitive witnesses. Uncontested letters of Paul. TeHtimony of the Revelation. The Gospels recognised in the third century . . 114 — 122 II. --The firHt century, the date of our four Gospels. Testi- mony of the second century. Testimony of heretics. Determination of the sacred text in the second century. LAn|;uaf;c of the Synoptics. Difference between the HynopticM and the fourth Gospel . . . . . . 122 — 129 III.- OriKin of the Synoptics. Their fundamental agreement. ' CorrcHpondcnccs^ and diyergencies of the Synoptics. VariouH explanations. Gospel spoken before wntten. The Ap()^tleB guardians of primitive tradition. Tradi- tion enriched by successive memories. Fidelity of thene memories. The written narratives. Formation of one tyne of narration. Appearance of the Gospels. CnnunicAl Gospels. Gospel according to Matthew. Hebrew and Greek Gospels. First Gospel not Judaeo- Chiimian. Gospel according to Mark. Testimony of PapiuM. Relations between Mark and Peter. Gospel of Aliirk written at Rome. Relations between Mark and Matthew. Third Gospel : Represents the teaching of Pnul. Luke author of the third Gospel. Date of thia Gospel •• .. .. .. ..129 — 158 \\\ Fourth Gospel. State of the Church at the close of the flrst century. Adaptation of the Gospel of John to the requirements of the times. Sketch of the life CONTENTS. XV PAOB. of St. John. John alone able to write the fourth Gospel. External evidence. Authenticity of the fourth Gospel. Unity of its plan. Refutation of ob- jections. Conclusion .. .. .. ..159 — x85 C H AFTER v.— Doctrinal bases of the life of Jesus • • . . 187—189 BOOK IL PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. — GENERAL CHARACTER OP HIS PUBLIC MINISTRY. Chapter I. — Childhood of Jesus .. .. .. ., zgo I. — Birth of Jesus Christ — year of Rome, 750. Anticipations of the great event. Vision of Zacharias. The An- nunciation. Miraculous conception of Jesus. Song of Mary. Birth of John the Baptist. First census in Judaea. Journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. ^ Birth of Jesus Christ. The Shepherds . . . . igo— 204 II. — Childhood of Jesus. The presentati n. Adoration of the Magi. The star. Massacre of the children. Childhood of Jesus at Nazareth. The child Jesus and the doctors of the Temple. Development of Jesus . .204 — ^sia Chapter II. — John the Baptist. Baptism of Jesus Christ . . 2x3 I. — Preparations and first preaching of the Forerunner. John the Baptist the new Elias. Preparation of John the Baptist tor his mission. John the Baptist in the Desert of Judaea. Preaching of John the Baptist. Baptism of the Forerunner. Effects of his preaching. His humility .. .. .. .. ..213 — 223 II. — Baptism of Jesus Christ — year of Rome, 780 . .223 — ^227 III. — ^John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. Fresh testimony of John the Baptist to Jesus. John the Baptist and Herod. Doubts of John the Baptist. Testimony of Jesus to John the Baptist . . . . . . . .227 — 231 Chapter HI. — The Temptation in the wilderness. Jesus con queror over temptation • • . • • • • Chapter IV. — The plan of Jesus . . .. •• • I. — Reality and unity of the Divine plan II.— The kingdom of Jesus. Fulfilment of the old covenant The plan of Jesus inseparable from His person 232 — 240 241 241 — 244 244—252 XVI CONTENTS. FAOB III. — The titles which Jesus claims. Son of David. Son of God. Son of man .. .. •• ..252 — 256 IV. — The Church and the Apostolate •• •• ..256 — 259 Chapter v.— The Teaching of Jesus Christ •• .. 260 I. — The subject of Christ's teaching. Jesus the subject of His own teaching. Infalhbility of Jesus .. ..260 — 263 II. — The form and method of the teaching of Jesus Christ. Calm majesty of His language. Popularity of His teaching. Its unscholastic character. Its moral cha- racter. Authority of the word of Jesus. Variety of His teaching. Parables. Conclusion .. ..263 — 276 Cmaptbr VI. — The Miracles of Jesus Christ .. .. 277 I. — Miracles of Jesus Christ in general. The miracles inseparable from the discourses. Difference between miracles and prodigies. Miracles reveal Jesus Christ. Divers sorts of miracles. Intention of miracles . . 277 — 283 II. — ^The healing of the Demoniacs. Reality of cases of possession. Healing of the possessed •• ..283 — 286 BOOK III. HRST PBRXOD OF TUB MINISTRY OF JB8US CHRIST. Chapter I. — Public Ministry of Jesus, from His baptism to His return into Galilee after the feast of Purim (year of Rome, 780-782). Three periods of the Minisiiy of Jesus. Unity of His Ministry • • • . , . ac o I. — Political condition of Judaea • • • . . . 290 — 293 II. — Commencement of the Ministry of Jesus. The first Disciples. First miracle of Jesus. Jesus drives out the sellers from the Temple. Conversation with Nico- demus. Jesus passes through Samaria .. ••293 — 30X III. — Return of Je us into Galilee. Meeting with the Samaritan woman. First public preaching. Jesus in the Synagogue at Nazareth .. .. ..30Z— 306 IV. — The Feast of Purim at Jerusalem. Healing of the Paralytic. Apologetic Discourse .. .. ..306 — ^309 Chapter II. — Ministry of Jesus in Galilee during the time of public favour •• .. •• •• •• 310 CONTENTS* XVli PAOB. L— General character of the Ministry of Jetus in Galilee* Early Miracles and early public Discourses in that country. Call of the Disciples. Lake of Tiberias. Christ's manner of life. One of the days of Jesus. HeaJing^ of a Leper. Time of public favour. Discon- tent of the Phansees .. .- .. ..3^0 — ^3*' II. — Choice of the Twelve Apostles . . .. . .321—335 III.— Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes. The new Law .. .. .. .. .. "Z*5 — 33' CHAPTfcR III. — Preparation of the Crisis in Galilee . . 33a I.^-Sojoum at Nain. Raising of the Widow's Son. The Sinner of Nain. Compassion of Jesus for the despised. Parable of the Prodigal Son .. .. •• 332-^^336 II. — ^Various Parables and Miracles. Parables relating to the kingdom of God. The Demoniac of Gadanu Raising of Jairus' Daughter. First Mission of the Apostles .. .. .. .. ••33^^343 Cbaptbs IV. — ^The Crisis of Faith in Galilee . . . . 344 I. — ^The multiplication of the loaves at Bethsaida- Julias. The Tempest on the Lake. Discourse at Capernaum . . 344 — ^345 BOOK IV* PERIOD OF CONFLICT. Chapter I. — Delegates sent by the Pharisees at Jerusalem into Galilee. — Journey into the Lands of the North rfrom the Spnng of the year of Rome, 78a, to the Autumn of the same year) • . . • . . 451 Iw — ^First intrigues of the Pharisees in Galilee .. ••352 — ^356 11.^-Joumey into the Lands of the North. The Woman of Canaan. Journey to Cassarea-Philippi. Peter's great confession. *'Thou art Peter." The Trans- figuration. Healing of the Demoniac Boy. Various eidiortations. The Lord's Prayer . . .. ••356 — ^364 Chapter II. — Sojourn at Jerusalem on the occasion of the feast of Tabernacles (Autumn of the year of Rome, 78a) . . 365 I. — Attitude of Jesus during the feast. Defence of Jesus. Discussion with the members of the Sanhedrim ••365 — 374 jjyjij CONTENTS. PA6R. II. — Healing of the Man born blind. Inauiiy of the Sanhe- drim. The Good Shepherd and tne Hireling . .374 — ^377 Chapter III. — Last Sojourn in Galileee^ Solemn return to Jerusalem through Samaria. Feast of the Dedication (from October to December, 782) . . . . . • 378 I. — Return of Jesus into Galilee. The duty of Charity. Mission of the Seventy. Surrender of earthly possessions. Characteristic sayings of Jesus . .378 — ^389 II. — Return to Jerusalem by Samaria. Feast of the Dedication .. .. .. .. ••389 — ^391 Chapter IV. — Sojourn in Peraea. The Family of Bethany. Resurrection of Lazarus . . . . . . . . 392 I. — Sojourn in Persea. Words of Jesus on the question of Divorce. The rich Young Man. Law of renuncia- tion. Compensation for sacrifices. Jesus blesses little children .. .. .. ••392 — 397 II. Resurrection of Lazarus. Deliberations of the Sanhe- drim • • .. ,. •• '"SQ? — 404 BOOK V. THE GREAT WEEK. — THE CLOSE OF THE STRUGGLE. — ^DEATH AND VICTORY. Chapter I. — Departure for the Feast. The Journey. Jericho. The supper at Bethany. Triumphal entry . . 405 I, — ^Journey to Jericho. Healing of blind Bartimseus. Jesus at the house of Zaccheus. Parable of the Talents.. .. .. .. .. ..405—409 II. — The adoration of Maiy of Bethany. Indignation of Judas .. .. .. .. .. ..410—414 III. Triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The barren fig-tree cursed .. .. .. .. .. ••414 — 4>S Chapter II.— Relations of Jesus with the authorities of His country. The new religion and the state .. . .419 — ^426 Chapter III. — The Day of captious Questions •• .. 427 I.— Attempt of the Pharisees to ensnare Jesus. His reply. Attempt of the Sadducees. Jesus* reply. Indig- nant words of the Master. Denunciation of Phari- saism ; •• .. .. .. ••427 — ^438 CONTENTS. XIX PAGE. II. — The great prophetic discourse. Jesus and the Greek proselytes. Parables enjoining watchfulness. The final judgment . . • • . . . . . .438^442 Chapter IV.— The Scenes in the Upper Chamber . . .. 443 I. — Preparations for the Last Supper. Character of the Jewish Passover. Jesus washes His disciples* feet. The traitor is pointed out. The Lord's Supper . .443 — 450 II. — ^Warnings and consolations. The sacerdotal prayer. .450—456 Chapter V. — Passion of Jesus • • • • . • . . 457 I.^-Gethsemane .. .. .. .. •• 457*^459 II.— The Arrest. First trial. Jesus in the house of Annas. Peter's denial. Jesus before the Sanhedrim . .459—463 III. — Jesus before Pilate. Jesus before Herod Antipas. Return to the Prsetorium. Condemnation of Jesus ..463 — ^468 rV. — ^The Crucifixion and Burial. Significance of the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus is redemption . .468 — ^484 Chapter VI. — The Resurrection of Jesus Christ .. •• 485 L^The facts. First appearances. Peter and John at the sepulchre. Interview of Jesus with Mary Mag- dalene. Noli tn€ tangfte. The disciples at Emmaus. Jesus appears in the upper cham1>er. Doubts of Thomas. Jesus shows Himself by the Lake of Tiberias. Second appearance in Galilee. The As- cension .. .• .. .. .. .. 485— '4 II.— -Reality of the Miracle . . . . . . . . 495— -5 Ill.—-Significance of the Resurrection. Conclusion ••501 — ^51 BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER I. OV THB PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS BASES OF THE LIFB OF CHRIST, — OF THB SUPERNATURAL. /^N the very threshold of the great subject before us we ^^ are confronted by two commanding but opposite points of view, between which it is necessary to choose. As the supernatural is admitted or rejected, the whole life of Jesus is transformed from its commencement to its close. In the former case, testimony and texts retain their evidential value ; in the latter, they are beforehand branded with suspicion, and what is left is not fact to be verified, but fable to be inter- preted. It is impossible, therefore, to bend too careful a study to a problem so vast and fertile in results ; it is the very foundation-stone of the whole building which has to be laid. Now we are at once struck with one patent fact, which greatly complicates the point at issue between the opposing partisans, or rather, which prevents their entering closely and seriously into controversy at all. This is the haughty and contemptuous refusal of the naturalistic school to put to a critical test the opinion of its opponents; its claim to lay down at the outset, as an indisputable axiom, the negation of the supernatural. This contempt for faith is in its essence also a contempt for science, a limit imposed on X 2 BOOK FIRST. free enquiry, and the first step in the path of prejudice, which is but a blind adherence to a preconceived and un- tested opinion. It is a flagrant deviation from those great experimental methods which for three centuries have been so constantly increasing the sum of human knowledge. Bacon was right when he pointed out as a source of error '*the exaggerated and almost idolatrous respect for human intellect ; a respect which turns men away from the con- templation of nature and of experience, and makes them revolve, as it were, in the circle of their own meditations and reflections.'* If the same peremptory method had been applied to the natural sciences, by which the supernatural is now put out of court without form of trial, we should find ourselves to-day maintaining the theory of vortices with Descartes against Newton, and treating the circulation of ^»he blood as a fable. Free enquiry has no worse foe than trenchant dogmatism, which eludes the test of proof equally in what it affirms and denies. Are we doing injustice to our adversaries? Let their own words be the judges. « The countries and classes by which the supernatural is received," says M. Renan, " are of secondary importance." * "If we do not enter upon this discussion," writes M. Havet, " it is from the impossibility of doing so without admitting an inadmissible proposition, namely, the mere possibility of the supernatural. Our principle is to hold ourselves constantly aloof from the supernatural, that is, from the imagination. The leading principle of all true history, as of all true science, is, that that which is not in nature is nothing, and can be counted as nothing, unless as an idea."f " Positive philosophy," says M. Littr6, " sets aside the systems of theology which suppose supernatural action. "{ We ask whether it is possible to elude examination and * Chair of Hebrew in the College of France. + ** Revue des Deux Mondes, ' ist August, XS63. X Littrd. ** Conservation, Revolution, et Positivisme," p. aG. PRELIMINARY QUB8TI0NS. 3 escape debate in a more pointed manner than by such words as these ? A judgment without law is the only possible result of such polemics. This revolutionary procedure is even more convenient than it is summaiy ; that which is treated thus is no legend bom of yesterday, but a mode of thought which has had the greatest spirits for its defenders, and which has ever moved mankind with an incomparable sway. It can be no argument against the supernatural, that miracles have never consented to submit themselves, like dubious drugs,* to the crucial examination of learned bodies. Such an argument implies so utter an ignorance of the moral and religious character of Christianity, that it does not deserve to be met. That handful of men who believed, eighteen centuries ago, in the Gospel miracles, were not brought, it is true, before official examiners, but they went down with calm conviction, in presence of a furious popu- lace, into the arena, and sealed with their blood their faith in a risen Lord. Evidence thus attested ceases to be con- temptible, and deserves to be at least examined. But no ; the miraculous and the incredible are bound together at the very threshold of the enquiry. Strauss, in his new '* Life of Jesus," declares that the most direct testimony is inad- nissible when it has reference to a fact which does not 6end to the laws of nature, and he reminds us of the Roman proverb, '^ I would not believe that story, though Cato him- self related it ;'* t which is equal to saying with one of old, ** Even though thou shouldest persuade me, I would yet not be persuaded." Such an attitude renders all enquiry impossible, and shuts us up to a blind credence. These assertions tend to nothing short of imposing upon us authoritatively a system of philo- * ** Vie de J^sns." M. Renan ; Introduction, p. 21. f ** Das Leben Jesu for das deutscbe Volk bearbeitet." 1863. MM. KefFtzer and Dolfuss have given ns a very good translation of this book. I quote, however, from the originaL 4 BOOK FIRST* sophy which is as £aiiiy matter for discussion as anything which has its date within the history of human thought. In fact, this negation of supematural, or rather, of its possibility, springs from a fixed theory of the whole nature of things. If this theory be justified to the reason, the cause of naturalism is gained, but not otherwise. It is, then, to this height that the debate must be carried, if it is to have tiny real issue. But this is not done. The appeal is made father to modem thought and to the results of the scientific movement — a mode of proceeding which leaves the real question still vague, and passes over in silence difficulties which would have to be met in a philosophical discussion ; a new and striking proof this of that enervation of the reason of which Christians are the first to complain. We will not follow the example of our opponents, and meet them with high and trenchant affirmations; we wish to show more respect for science ; and without entering on a complete demonstration, which would require an entire volume, we will give our main reasons for rejecting those philosophical principles, in the name of which those who differ from us dismiss the supernatural. We will establish its possibility, while the history of primitive Christianity, and its well- attested witnesses, shall determine for us the form of its realization and its true character. The supernatural is ousted in our day in the name of two opposing doctrines, between which we make a wide dis- tinction. Naturalistic philosophy, or pantheism, rejects it, repelling with it all order, spiritual and moral. Theism, in its different degrees, opposes it on the ground of the very perfection of that order, which appears to it to imply the inviolable fixity of the first laws of nature. We shall main- tain the possibility of the supernatural against the one and the other school, not hiding from ourselves that the first has with it the rising tide of opinion ; while the second is led, by the very gravity of its position, to recognise ever PRELilflNART QUESTIONS. 5 more and more, the close bond of solidarity which exists be- tween the cause of true spiritualism and that of Christianity. I. Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Naturalistic point of view. We will remark, at the outset, that we attach very little weight to the argument borrowed from the development of the sciences during the last three centuries, which deduces, from their vast advances, the negation of the supernatural. We ask, What are the sciences spoken of ? Are they those which bear on the knowledge of nature ? We freely admit that these have advanced with giant strides, and one of the most incontestable glories of our age is that of having dis- covered a multitude of new phenomena in the physical order of things, and of having classed them under demonstrated laws. The domain of the unknown contracts its bounds day by day, and the part which imagination has to play in the explanation of natural facts is reduced almost to the minimum; physics and chemistry have slain the false magicians who cast their spells upon nations in their child- hood or their ignorance. But how does the widest acquaint- ance with nature affect the belief in the supernatural? The very word surpasses an order beyond and above that of nature. What matters it from this point of view that man has discovered the secret concatenation of phenomena of a lower order? Does it follow that the chain may not be broken or interrupted by a sovereign power ? When all the links in the chain of natural causes and effects have been brought to light, will it follow that the first link may not be in the hands of a wise and sovereign God ? Doubtless, if the supernatural were confounded with the marvellous, if it implied a capricious activity, working by perpetual prodigies, so that there could be no fixity in the lower order, the progress of the science would be fatal to it. But, rightly understoodi it presupposes natural orders and laws, since it 6 BOOK FIRST. claims to be recognised precisely in the suspension and interruption of those laws. If there were no fixed natural order, there would be, properly speaking, no room for the supernatural ; the extraordinary supposes the ordinary, the exception implies the rule. Let science scrutinise as she may the secret of nature, and go on till she forms of nature herself a vast and admirably classified museum for the spirit of man ; faith in the supernatural has nothing to dread from her researches. It would be otherwise if some new and considerable facts, decidedly contrary to final causes, had been produced in support of naturalism. But men are farther than ever from such a demonstration, so that we have a right to affirm that the theses of naturalism appear the less plausible the more they are confronted with advanced science. What have we then to fear from its progress ? I admit that knowledge brings its intoxication ; the in- tellect which has grasped a planet in its span is fain to lay claim to universal knowledge, to recognise no limits to its dominion, and to ignore those which outlie it. Hence the too frequent tendency of ages of scientific discovery to narrow the horizon of thought, to bring it within the lower sphere of things, so as to spare itself the humiliation of acknow« ledging that above and beyond all the known stretches the region of the infinite and the divine. Thus, by a singular contradiction, an inordinate ambition leads to an ignoble limitation of the human faculties. It is not, then, the pro- gress of science which threatens faith in the supernatural, but the insensate infatuation of some of its votaries, — a, thing as wholly distinct as is wild enthusiasm from rigorous logic. The fact remains, however, that under the shelter of this kind of scientific frenzy naturalism has entrenched itself strongly, not only in the domain of the natural sciences, properly so called, but even in that of philosophy. It is a swelling flood, which carries along on its rapid tide every one who abandons the terra firma of moral truths. It PREUmNAKY QUESTIONS. 7 behoves us to examine carefully into its sources, and to trace its transformations in our own time. At the commencement of the century it make its first ap» pearance in the magnificent and poetic pantheism of Schel- ling ; he affirms in brilliant utterances the identity of natural and spiritual order, clothes with delusiye images a deter- minism as positive as that of Spinosa, and holds up again to the dazzled gaze the mirage of a false infinite, which does not in reality pass the bounds of the world of natural phe- nomena. Hegel gives it its most perfect form ; he pretends to find in human reason the very formula of the absolute, which is not distinct from the created worid, but developes itself through universal life, in an evolution regulated by fixed laws, of which logic shows us the sequence. Thus, from kingdom to kingdom in nature, from sphere to sphere in human existence, from era to era in history, the absolute reveals itself ever more perfectly, till it arrives at the full con- sciousness of itself, as the idea of all things in the reason of man. There, on the highest step of metaphysical abstraction, is its icy throne, fit>m which it descends incessantly to recom- mence its eternal evolution, under the impulse of that famous dialectic method which brings negation out of affirmation, and from their repeated collision evolves new categories, to be themselves again carried along in the vortex of a cease- less development Thus is the woof of the universe and of our destinies woven under the hand of an inflexible logic more weird and wan than the ancient Fate ; thus does our world revolve upon itself, tightly bound within its own limits, for its totality constitutes the absolute; there is nothing beyond it ; it is at once divine and circumscribed ; there is not left one fissure, small or great, through which free action might pass athwart the dialectic network which shuts it in. Sound to the depths of this philosophy, you will find no other element ; it has been able, for a time, to make an illusive show to superficial observers by employing Chris- 8 BOOK FIRST. tian symbols ; but the fatalistic and naturalistic idea, which is its essence, has not succeeded in confining itself within a mould too narrow for it — it has broken it, and Feuerbach spoke candidly when he repudiated resolutely the notion of religion. The learned structure of Hegelianism was soon abandoned ; it cost too great an effort to the modern mind^ and especially to the mind of France. This pantheism of the idea, with its ingenious method and bold deductions, was quickly cast aside, but the influence of the system remained no less considerable. The school of Hegel first taught that the absolute is not beyond this world, and then that this ever self-evolving absolute absorbs into itself the most flagrant contradictions, and dwindles to the eternal re- lative. Hence fall all marked distinctions between the false and the true, between good and evil ; they are not ; they arise only to be incessantly unmade and remade ; for there is no fixed type of the true, the beautiful, the good, since there is no God. Moral freedom is crushed under the grinding wheels of system. Hegelianism, thus vulgarised and de- spoiled of the deep and hardy speculations which made its grandeur, has crept into our intellectual atmosphere; wo trace its influence in the principal sections of the naturalistic school, which is only unanimous in rejecting peremptorily the idea of supernatural order. Thence proceeds that scep- ticism of the scoffer or the atheist, which is ever repeating that everything is relative, that we are but a shadow pro« jected on the eternal illusion. It is graceful, truly, in those who have reached this negation of thought to assume a position of proud superiority, and to dispense their scorn, as if there were in all the world of intellect a situation more miserable and pitiable than theirs. Positivism is only a less agreeable form of this scepticism. It also, by its elimination of causes from the world, and primarily of free and moral causes, has retained the great lesson of Hegelianism, that the absolute does not exist be- PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 9 yond the finite ; it thence concludes that there is nothing reliable but outward fact, that metaphysics is but a mirage of the mind, a dangerous relic of theology ; it supposes it- self to have discovered the essential order of things, because it presents a new classification of the sciences ; it affirm^ with startling audacity that all which does not come under this classification has no existence ; consequently, neither conscience, nor the sense of the divine, nor the ineictinguishable thirst after moral and religious truth — once the rack and glory of the human soul — have any right to be ; a creed which does not prevent it, nevertheless, from mocking our highest needs with I know not what ridiculous worship of humanity, upon which the present adherents of the school voluntarily preserve a prudent silence. In vain does a noble and vigorous mind essay to reconquer from positivism the realm of metaphysics, while yet maintaining that the absolute has no personal existence ; he arrives only At an ideal which is the contrary of the real, which vanishes when he would give it life, which only is on condition of not beingf so that the first article ^^ tjiis strange theodicy might be defined thus: God is the opposite of being; He is a pure abstraction. The spiritualism of M. Vacherot is only distinguished fi-om positivism by a sterile good intention, for with him the category of the ideal is confounded with that of the non-existent. It is not easy to grasp the Hegelian atheism amid the sensibilities, the lyric and mystic efiusions, the prayers to the Celestial Father, which abound in M. Kenan's books ; but beneath the unction of this surface is soon perceived the hollow void, the abyss whence we have emerged, the impersonal ideal of which the name of God is a heavy and vulgar translation. He has taken pains to come forth from the gilded cloud in which he chooses to enwrap himself with such words as these : " The historical sciences are based on the supposition that ro .supernatural agent comes 10 BOOK FIRST. forth k> trouble the progress of humanity ; that there is no free existence superior to man, to whom an appreciable share may be assigned in the moral conduct, any more thaa in the material conduct of the universe. For myself, I believe that there is not in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man ; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity; regarded apart from humanity, that absolute is but an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form." * Here is some- thing definite. Since his preface to the translation of Job it has been well known that the immortality of the soul means for M. Renan nothing more than the beneficent memory left by a noble life upon humanity. Morality, like the rest of religion, is confounded with aesthetics, and the worship of the beautiful is the only serious worship. M. Taine, the brilliant rival of M. Renan, professes naturalism with in* finitely more simplicity; he does not embarrass himself either with Hegel or with the ideal ; he returns to the sen- sualism of the eighteenth centuxy, stripping Condillac of his periphrasis. It was needful to show on what system of philosophy the supernatural is in our day eliminated with so much boasting; nothing better proves to what an extent it is bound up with the most elementary principles of theism. We will content ourselves with just recallin^^ these principles to our antago* nists, maintaining that they themselves demand from th9 reason far greater sacrifif.es than any required by the pro- founder mysteries of rel/gion. To the positivists who not only reject such or such solution of the metaphysical and religious problem, but who suppress the problem itself, and not content with denying supernatural order, forbid it to intrude on the mind, we reply : You, who pretend to explain all which is observable to man in this world, are not consistent with yourselves; you do not carry out your programme, for unless you recognise as * '* Revue des Deux Mondes," x86o, p. 383. PREUMINART QUESTIONS. II positive fact only that which is sensible and tangible, you cannot deny that there is in humanity as well in our days of civilisation as in mjrthologic ages, an all-puissant instinct which urges man to seek a moral satisfaction beyond the temporal and finite, an unconquerable aspiration toward that which is eternal. There is no UlcI more positive than the religious sentiment. In the eloquent words of M. Guizot : " You may interrogate the human race in all time and in all places, in all states of society and all grades of civilisation, and you will find men everywhere and alwa3rs believing spontaneously in facts and causes beyond this sensible world^ diis living mechanism called nature." * Positivists, ye men of the outward fact, here is a positive fact, which, of all the rest, has exercised the weightiest in- fluence on the destinies of our race ; here is a fact universal and incontestable, appreciable not only in the individual but in the race, and you take no account of it. In vain you seek to substitute it with ** the astonishment of feeble and thinking humanity plunged into the immensity of the uni- verse/*\ This "feeble and thinking humanity" soars per- petually beyond this immense universe, seeking its God ; your attempted substitution does not avail, and the fact remains unexplained, or rather set aside and denied by you. Strange positivism that, which gives no place in science to the human yearning which has worked most mightily on history, and has troubled and agitated the race to its depths, not like a passing wind which swells the waves, but like that mysterious law which day by day heaves the whole heart of ocean. Positivism rejects supernatural and divine order, on the pretext that it is without the world ; and behold, this supernatural order invades the world itself, at least by the passionate longings which it excites, and thus asserts its right to be placed in the category of appreciable facts to be verified and explained. The school of fact is thus unfaith- ♦ " M^itations sur la Religion," p. 05. t «*Cours de Philosophic Posirive,'^ par Auguste Comte. NouTclle edition. 1864. Pnfface par M. T jttl^, p. 26. 12 BOOK FIRST. ful to itself, and it is not needful, in order to establish its insufficiency, to invoke the rights of soul and conscience which it ignores ; it is enough to prove to positivism that it sets aside the positive facts which fetter it, and thus is Qn« true to its own method. To reconquer moral and divine order from pantheism, we appeal to the numerous and weighty facts which are not compatible with the explanation given by it of the universe. This explanation is found in all its systems, however worked out, propped up as they may be by dialectics imposing as those of Hegelianism, or invested with the elegance of our literary metaphysicians ; in all comes out the declaration, that nature is self-sufficient, that it is not the work of an intelligent, personal cause, distinct from the world itself, and finally, that there is no place in universal life or in history for moral freedom. Material order is everything. Hence the impossibility of admitting supernatural order. Well, but what if the science of nature, metaphysics, and con- science give the lie to this solution, which only appears satis- factory because it suppresses all that would embarrass it ? The science of nature in its wide and mighty current sets aside the hypothetical systems which have essayed to endow matter with the faculty of transforming itself and originat- ing life. Neither the theory of natural selection, nor that of spontaneous generation has been able to stand the test of a close and impartial examination. Nature presents herself to us ordered upon a uniform plan; she forms a living ladder upon which existences are disposed by ranks, but in such sort that they cannot of themselves raise them- selves from one step of the ascending line to another — nay, more, each species supposes a creative act. A plan mar- vellously wise is unfolded in the general arrangement of the series, and the hAnd of the Creator appears in each new link.* The work cannot, then, be confounded with tho * See M. Tanet*8 work on <* Le Mat^rialisme Contemporain.*' PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. I3 worker, since nature is powerless to pass alone the space comprised between any two species. It follows that even into the domain of necessity shines the light of the moral world — the world of freedom and of mind. Matter only arrives at life and organisation under the action of a free and spiritual cause, ** The perfections of God are deariy seen in creation." Further, spirit itself appears in the world not simply in the impress of intelligence and goodness which is reflected ever in the lower organisms, but again in a direct manifes- tation— ^I mean in man. Here is thought, here is reason, here is moral life. Having never succeeded in bringing a bird from a reptile, a mammal from a rodent, how shall we suppose that man is developed from the lower animals? Not a single fact has been successfully adduced in support of this abject hypothesis. ''From all bodies together," says Pascal, " you cannot draw one thought." How should spirit be bom of matter ? The appearance of life in the inorganic world was a new fact, or to speak more correctly, an act of creation, for it could not leap from the insensate stone like the spark from fretted pebbles. The appearance of animal life was equally a new act, for plant never gave forth other than vegetable life. Surely from the life of the animal to that of the spirit the leap is mere wide and sudden still, and creative energy must have manifested itself with greater glory to produce this higher form of life, or rather to reproduce itself in it. Thus it is that without having recourse to the brilliant tablets of earth and sky, by which we are wont to be led from the admiration of a woik so perfect to the adoration of its Author; without invoking from the shining day and starry vault that triumphal hymn to the Creator, of which the sweet singer of Israel wakes for us an echo; without appealing to poetry — ^less false than the vulgar prose which, while it assumes to banish the false ideal, banishes the true idea of all things, — it is enough to 14 BOOK FIRST. invoke the science of nature, in order to recognise, even in this lower realm, the great, free, mighty cause which we call God. Supernatural order has set its seal on the natural, which, without it, would have no existence. The science of metaphysics is not less opposed than that of nature to the pantheistic idea« First, reason refuses to admit that the perfect and infinite, to which it has the con* ception, can he inseparably bound to the imperfect and the finite, that the imperfect and finite form part of God Him« self!* For if it is objected that the distinct existence of God is a limit to absolute being, and consequently takes away that character of infinitude which theism attributes to Him, we reply that there are two conceptions of the infinite ^-one which confounds it with the totality of things and beings, and which destroys in the very process of stating it ; another which makes it consist in omnipotence, omniscience, independence of all which is relative and incomplete, in the intensity and plenitude of being, and not in its extension, — in one word, in perfection. If God, after having created the world contingent and finite, remains without and beyond it. His will is none the less absolute ; beside and before Him are only the creatures whom He has been pleased to call into life. Hence the essence of being is will, f But this is just the redoubtable metaphysical difficulty over which pan- theism stumbles. It recognises no cause free and trans* cendent to the world, to nature, and history. For it there is no other absolute than the universe arriving at the con- sciousness of itself in our reason. But evidently universal life does not begin with this highest form ; it does not open with thought, which is rather like the flower of this vast development, for it is not the cause of it, but the product. That which is at the starting-point, at the origin of things, * See on this subject the able remarks of M. Jules Simon, in his book on *• La Religion Naturelle.'* •f* See ** Les Philosophes Contemporains," by M. Eugene Poitou, and «« L*Id^ de Dieu," by M. Caro. PRBLIMINARY QUBSTION8. X5 is not the idea, not mind, but abstract being — an existence so vague as to be akin to non-existence. Thus the greater results from the less, life from death or from inertia ; the immense column of universal existence springs from sheer nonentity. For what, in definite terms, is the abstract Being oi Hegelianism, or that fathomless abyss, whence the universe is made to arise, if it is not nonentity ? Thus the famous axiom, Ex nihilo nihUf cannot be applied to Chris> Hans, or to the spiritualistic philosophers who place absolute being before the world, but it falls with its whole weight on the systems of i antheism. It is idle to suppose myriads of centuries bringing forms of existence out of this nonentity ; time, as has been well said, has nothing to do with the question. Millions of years cannot make fruitful that which has itself no existence. Behold, then, a grand and gorgeous effect — ^the world with its harmonies, humanity with its highest life, bom not even of Thales' drop of water, but of a void I Reason protests against such a doctrine, and to accept it she must needs deny the principle of causality, which is one of her essential elements.* The moral consciousness protests yet more loudly; it could not survive the suppression of divine order. It affirms it with authority every time that it enjoins the right on us, and upbraids us for the wrong ; for what it commands is ofiten that which we have no will to do, and what it condemns is that which our inclination has prompted. It is not, then, the simple echo of our hearts ; it speaks in the name of a law, which is neither that of o .r senses nor of our mobile and impassioned soul ; it brings us into the presence of another than ourselves, of one greater than ourselves, who has an absolute right over us, and its ** Thau shalt** sounds yet above the wrecks of all our other convictions, establishing in us an immovable certitude. The categorical imperative^ * See the noble remarks, c. 5, in " La Raison et le Christianisme/' of M. Charles Secretan, and the Lectures of M. Naville oa ** La Vie Etemeile.** X6 BOOK FIRST, to employ the manly language of Kant, is the rock on which rests the whole moral life of individuals and of societies, and which sophistical speculation has no real power to fritter away, even when it pretends to have ground it to powder. The metaphysician who has ignored conscience is compelled to lean on it every instant ; so soon as he relaxes his watch- fulness over himself he returns to instinctive and universal beliefs; and every time that, in view of crime or treachery, he utters a cry of indignation, he acknowledges that moral order which he has sought to confound with the order of necessity. Yes, the human soul believes in liberty, in responsibility, in law, and its sanction ; man believes that there is something which is the good, the true, the right, and some one who en- joins this upon him, renders it possible to him, and watches over its accomplishment Pantheism, applied truly and upon a large scale, even by its best representatives, would cover with a plenary indulgence all infamies, would unchain wholly the powers of evil, and render life impossible. It would find its most terrible refutation in its very application, which would be the daring negation of life and duty, the justification of every deed done, a sort of natural selection carried on in the bosom of humanity, for the benefit of the violent and the fro- ward ; it would be the reign of force over a servile and degraded race. Thank Heaven, this frightful reductio ad absurdum of pantheism is not needful; even should all the tribunals which rest on the idea of responsibility and of j ustice be abolished, the inward tribunal would still remain; conscience would lift its voice to attest that the human race is not mistaken in believ- ing that good is not another name for evil, and evil another name for good; that the will is not a spring moved by the law of necessity; that responsibility is real and earnest, and that freedom, far from being an illusion, is the perilous and glori- ous gift bestowed by Him who created man in His own image. Everything within us proclaims His being. I ask no other proof of it than those unquenchable aspirations, that need of PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. IJ an infinite love, that boundless void which nothing avails'tc fill, that holy agony so admirably expressed by the inspired Hebrew, who spoke for the whole race when he cried, ** My soul thirsteth for God ! " Contemporary pantheism has against it not only all thai is elevated and noble in the human heart, but also the abjecf position to which it is sinking so rapidly in Germany and France. As we have already shown, the most outspoken ma- terialism is its natural successor and its legitimate scourge; it cannot long remain on the steep declivity where it is placed by its negation of a personal God and of Freedom ; its false and artificial idealism 3rields quickly to sensualism. It is enough in our days, in order to refute those who have made of man the sole god of the universe, to set against them those who, with M. Taine, made him <* the human beast." ** Man," says he, ** is an animal, save in exceptional mo- ments ; blood and instinct are his guides ; necessity lashes, and the beast goes forward — ^the moral translates the phy- sicaL" And this C3mical and unblushing materialism walks as proudly as if it were not a blot on the generation which retrogrades to it I It has been a hundred times victoriously refuted ; it haii been called upon to explain how matter, which we know only by our perceptions, — that is, by the exercise of our mind, — should be found to have greater certainty than that mind itself, which is not only the first organ of knowledge, but also its most direct object. It is notorious that while the corporeal existence is undergoing a perpetual process of renovation, molecule by molecule, mind preserves its identity. If a close correlation between the manifestations of thought and the physical organs, which serve as its in- struments, cannot be denied, this correlation is never in an exact proportion to its development.* * See M. Janet's article '*Le Cerveaa,'* in the "Revue des Detix Mondes,*' June and July, 1865. 2 ^g BOOK FIRST* Let U8 then have it explained how the molecules which enter day by day into the corporeal organism can suddenly be invested with spiritual qualities, which they did not be* fore possess ; how, from the atom, ever divisible and finite, there should come forth the thought which has none of its attributes; how, if there is nothing beyond the physical, the influences of the moral on the physical are as indisputable as are the inverse influences ; how, finally, two orders of facts, often in contradiction, are to be brought into a facti* tious unity. But materialism is not a doctrine, it is a ditch into which fall the spiritually blind ; it is the shadows which engulf the pretended philosophers, who, having first denied ' God in heaven, next deny Him in man. The insoluble mystery is, that souls enamoured of liberty should be found to applaud this shameless sensualism, which counts in oar day so many adherents. Such a mental condition reminds us of the prophecy of a philosopher at the beginning of the century : " Our age will become so cultivated that it will be as ridiculous in its eyes to believe in God as it is now to believe in ghosts. Then shall the sweat of holy conflict be dried on every brow. Then shall tears of lofty aspiration fail to every eye; nothing but ringing laughter shall be heard among men, for reason will have reached the term of its work, and humanity attained its goal."* Let us hope that many misguided spirits will recoil finally from a theory which makes humanity emerge from the steaming sloughs of chaos only to return to them again. All whose dignity it hurts to be the descendants of monkeys, will recognise what a price is paid for the surrender of- supernatural order, and will return to it in the name of science, and of conscience, as to the sole adequate explana- tion of the enigma of the universe.f The advocates of + Lichtenberg. " Vcrmischte Schriften," I., p. i66. f Since these pages were written, M. Ernest Naville has published his beautiful work, entitled '* Le Fere Celeste." It is needless to observe how entirely I am at one with hinu ^Koaf^Bssmi^mmm^s^mmm^^^msm PRELIMINARY QUBSTIONS. I9 freedom will remember the cruel lessons of history, and whoever owns a deadly disgust with the era of the Caesars^ will repel with indignation the abject philosophy which gave it birth, remembering that, as has been said by a great publicist, "There is a sure and secret understanding be- tween materialism and despotism." II. Refutation of objections made to the Supernatural from the Theistic point of view. It follows from the preceding considerations that those historians of Jesus who, in the name of pantheism, have at the outset dismissed the supernatural without discussion and without eicamination, have started with an d priori thesis which they have not made good. We have the right to maintain, in opposition to them, the existence of a divine order beyond and above nature, which we may call the supernatural order. This once recognised, we cannot be- ibrehand limit its action aild intervention in nature, and it is logical to admit, at least, the possibility of miracle. Here the theistic school arrests us, and while admitting with us this divine order, pretends to dispute, the possibility of miracles, in the name of the very perfection of order, which implies the immutability of the laws of the world. It is to this objection that we proceed now to reply. It will not embarrass us much. It is necessary first to come to an understanding about these laws. Does science permit us to confer on them an absolute value ? Are they other than formulas designed to generalise the sum of facts hitherto established ? It is well to be careful not to overpass the bounds of certainty, possible in this region. Beyond this, the greater or less fixity of these laws matters little. There are other laws, the immu- tability of which is evident in quite another manner ; I allude to the very conditions of the divine life. Absolute being, precisely because it is absolute, distinct from the world, is 20 BOOK FIRST. sovereignly free and independent. Now, if in creating the world it had alienated its own liberty, enchained its inde- pendence by the very laws which it is supposed to have given to nature, it would follow that the divine order must have been profoundly shaken and changed ; the immutability of natural laws would involve the transformation, or rather, the per- turbation, of the supernatural order, which is the order of absolute freedom. Divine sovereignty recognises no limit in the order of nature, which is the order of necessity. If the creation limited its Author, He would be enclosed and en- chained by it, and theism would be definitively compromised. Therefore has nature been so organised as to be in nowise closed against new interventions of Divine power. Have we not marked the traces of successive acts of creation in the various ranks of beings which followed each other up to the appearance of man ? And is not this appearance itseli the great miracle of creation ? What is there to hindei creative power from manifesting itself anew for the realisa- tion of its designs ? Above the special laws of nature is the law of natural life itself, which consists in absolute de- pendence upon God for its maintenance. The worst of dis- orders would be the abrogation of such a law. The choice, then, is between the invariable fixity of the laws of nature and the maintenance of the Divine sovereignty. It is of no avail to bring forward the immanency of God in nature ; we grant that we live and move in Him ; but it is one thing to believe in His incessant operation, and an- other to identify Him with natural laws, as if the law of gravity or of electricity were the necessary mode of Hie existence. Such a conception of immanency leads straight to pantheism, and implies the confusion of the Creator with the creation. If it is objected that we ourselves impair His absolute sovereignty by admitting that He has created beings in His own image, whose free-will He respects, we reply that these beings belong wholly to another domain than that PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 21 of nature, and that it has pleased God to exempt them from the passivity which characterises the lower orders. Besides, it is from Him that they hold this liberty, in which He re* spects His own creative will, and He has in nowise bound Himself not to act directly upon them, and to interpose in their moral history, while ever maintaining in the mode oi His action the marked distinction between moral order and the order of nature. What, then, is this talk about the overthrow of natural laws ? No one disputes that God is exalted, in virtue of His omnipresence and omniscience, above all the laws which limit creative beings, by the revolutions of time and the divisions of space. Why should He not be as independent of other natural laws as of these ? More than this ; moral and free agents modify ceaselessly the application of natural laws ; they combine and utilise them so as to call forth from them new effects, which would not be produced by their habitual and regular action ; it may be even said that they suspend them in their operation. When my hand throws a stone high in air, it withdraws the stone for a moment from the law of gravity, which nailsi it to earth or attracts it thither. Thus is it in a multitude of indifferent actions. What shall hinder me from admitting that the absolute Being, who holds in His almighty hand the keyboard of all the forces of nature, the known and unknown, may draw from it chords which pass our calculation ? Hence it follows that miracles, which suppose the combination of natural forces, known or unknown, have nothing in them in opposi- tion to nature's laws. We go farther ; we admit absolute miracle, that is, the direct manifestation of the creative power without a medium. There is nothing impossible from that point of view of theism which recognises a free creation, one which is not simply the organisation of eternal matter. Are the laws of nature violated because a fact is accom- plished by the direct exercise of Divine power 7 Must the 22 BOOR FIRST. vine iieeds be withdrawn from the laws of vegetable growth because, at Cana, water was once changed into wine ? Must the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves hinder the sown earth from bearing, that year, its harvest ? No general law then was violated ; it would be otherwise if it was estab- lished that Divine power could not have produced such effects : then it would follow, that it is no more sovereignly free ; it would have lost its essential characteristics, and there would ensue a perturbation of the order of the universe of more weighty import than the most amazing prodigy, for — let us not forget it — ^the supernatural is the freedom of God, and it can only be abandoned, or at least its possibility contested, by abandoning a personal God.* Theism replies to these considerations by appealing to iiie wisdom of the Creator. How, it asks, suppose that God, •overeignly wise, has not realised His own idea by the best means, and that He needs to retouch His work as poet corrects his verses, because they are defective? The ob- jection would hold if we belonged to the world of necessity instead of to that of freedom. Yes, if the entire creation fiad been complete when it issued from the hands of God, and universal life had been meant to flow on an untroubled course between insurmountable banks, a new and extraor dinary intervention of Divine power could no more be con- ceived, than the touch of an alien chisel on marble sculptured by Phidias. But, in this sense, creation was not complete ; the free creature, man, had to determine his own destiny by an act of will, which implies the possibility of evil being in- troduced into a perfect work. Thus the divine poem of the creation, to borrow the image of a father of the Church, has been interpolated; the determination to be free has had fatal consequences for man himself and for the earth, which, given to him as the theatre of his activity, has become that * See. on tbis subject, the remarks of M. Rothe, in his little work, *' Zur Dogmatik," p. 66, and following. PRSLIMINART QUESTIONS. 23 of his perpetual chastisement, till he mingles dust with dust. It is not, then, His own work that God has to correct, as if it had heen originally imperfect and wanting ; it is a helping hand which He holds out to a creature lost and miserable through his own fault. The case is thus stated in far difftrr- ent terms ; the Divine wisdom is not the point in question. If the fall of mankind is disputed, we answer that, short of an optimism as superficial as it is untenable, it must be impossible to contest its misery and degradation. To all whose eyes are not blinded, man appears a being fallen and debased. He has his joys, his grandeurs, and gleams of nobility ; his miseries are the miseries of a lord of creation ; he is not a parvenu animal, but a being celestial and divine, fallen from his high estate, and still mindful of it. In spite of spring with its smile, and youth with its enchantment, in spite of short felicities and glowing dreams, we see the race panting^ under its load of suffering, till one by one its chil- dren yield up their breath in a last agony. For the majority of men existence is one long battle with hunger, in pro- tracted ignorance and thankless labour. Bread is a con- quest always dearly bought. To all death is preceded by a long procession of bodily ills, and to some it appears almost a remedy, so has their life been smitten and wounded. One mighty groan has been rising for six thousand years from this earth, watered with sweat and tears. It is, as says the poet, the voice of men who weep ; they curse the day when they were born every time that a new stroke of destiny re- calls them to the poignant verity of their situation. Doubt- less, in the midst of all these woes, the chariot of progress advances, but there are stains of blood on its wheels, and we know but too well what it crushes in its course. Vain is it to seek for a smoother road ; it must ever leave each generation on the sepulchral fields, in which the fairest dis- coveries of science cannot smooth a single furrow. Side by side with the sorrows of mankind are its crimes, its base- 24 BOOK FIRST* nesses, explosions of hatred, fevers of voluptuousness* It is not needful to multiply deeply-coloured pictures^ or to track far the miry, bloody course of history. Is not the de- structive force ever being unchained among men, let loose by themselves, and ever equally terrible, whether assuming the guise of pleasure causing death, or that of hatred en- kindling fratricidal war ? Without widening our horizon, it is enough to contemplate the crimes of one single city — ^the most brilliant let it be, and the fairest to the eye — and to re- member what one single night there covers with its wings I It is enough to lift that other veil, not less dark, which hides the life of each man, to descend into the depths of one's own beingy and to own courageously to one's-self that which none would confide to dearest friend. If this was the normal state of humanity, if this the primal work of God, what, then, is that God ? and why guard with so anxious a care a wisdom so cruelly belied ? The Christian solution, which places at the source of history a terrible falling away of the moral creature, appears to us, Qotwithstanding its mystery, alone compatible with the con- ception of a God holy and free. Original sin opened the world to evil and to sorrow ; and it is only too certain that both are ceaselessly renewed by hereditaxy influence. This is a fact that can only be denied with the denial of evil itself, and with it of good, of God, and of moral order. All the explanations of evil given by deism fall before a rigorous examination ; they are forced to palliate it, to reduce it to being only a privation of the absolute, the necessary con- dition of the creature; they finish almost by making it something natural and simple, to be softened down as far as possible, and thus they Ring a roseate tinge upon our heavy shadows. But none the less does the malignant power carry on its ravages in the heart of humanity, which, in- capable of exorcising, ceases not to curse it. And were all outward forms of suffering removed, the soul would raise to PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 25 heaven a yet more despairing cry, because she would then be devoted wholly to the inward torture, consumed by the thirst after righteousness and the infinite ; like Rachel, she will not be comforted, because her God is not, or rather because she is no more her God's. All great poetry is in its essence the poetry of sorrow. Vain is it, as Plato beautifully expresses it, to seek to banish from man's memory the time when, in the light, he celebrated the divine mysteries ; he remembers that he is of the race of God ; therefore he is inconsolable. This incurable regret, mingled with an ardent though indefinite aspiration, is at the foundation of religion as of art. It is to be traced in the fables of all the ancient religions. All unite in proclaiming that primitive natural order has been over- thrown, not by deed of God, but by deed of the estranged moral creature, and that it has become an order against nature. Thenceforward the supernatural is only the resto- ration of true nature, a return to the really natural order ; it loses thus all semblance of arbitrariness. If the fall is but a delusion, if evil is only the imperfection necessary to the harmony of the whole, I can understand the objections of the deist to miracle. But if it is true, that God's free creature is unhappy through his own fault, and has placed himself under the yoke of a calamity as tre- mendous'as it is terrible, in the name of what principle can those who recognise a sovereign Deity set aside the super- natural ? After all, miracle, which must not be regarded exclusively in its secondary manifestations, is nothing else than the intervention of the Divine freedom to save man, conformably with the laws of moral order. What 1 You admit that God is free, is Master of the creation which He called out of nothing, and yet to this free God you deny the right to arise from His rest to restore His fallen creatures, because, to this end. He must needs break the chain of cause and efiect, and introduce a novel fact in history ? But if 26 BOOK FIRST. He cannot save, hdw could He then create 7 Creation is apparently an act of love which reveals the depth of His being. If you question His sovereign right to save His creature when fallen from happiness, you refuse Him that which is the very essence of His being ; you impugn His moral immutability, which must be in nowise confounded with immobility or inertia. The supernatural is, then, not only the freedom of God, it is also His love. I know no other definition of it more rigorously exact Of what avail would His freedom be to God, in the sense in which it is accorded by theism, if He were unable to use that freedom for good ? God is not dependent on natural order. Let it, then, be admitted that nothing is more conceivable than His sove* reign intervention in that order, to restore it when it has been overthrown. What more untenable, in good logic, than the inconsistent theism which admits a free Deity, but forbids Him to use His freedom, and compels His wisdom to restrain His love? Such a system must either ascend or descend ; its only refuge is above itself in Christianity, which alone realises fully its high conception of God, or below itself in pantheism, which suppressing all trans- cendent and divine order, admits nothing but natural law. In deism this natural law acts as a sort of maitre du palais, governing in the name of a fainSant king, who is himself governed by it. There is nothing left but to depose such a sovereign. '* Dandum est D^o," said Saint Augustine, " eum aliquid facere posse quod nos investigare nan possumus.'* " We must grant that God is able to do that which we are not able to search out." There is one school more inconsistent still than the deistic ; it is that which pretends to give us a Christianity without miracles, and seriously maintains that the super- natural is an indifferent element in the religion of the Gospel. Such is the confusion of spirits in our day, that theologians are to be found, who, repudiating overtly the KRBLIMINARY QUBSTIONS. 27 notion of a personal God, yet make use of the name of Jesus Christ. When the Church shall have enlarged her borders wide enough to enclose these, there will cease to be a Church, for she will then have cast away that which has hitherto made her a society of Christians. The deists who claim to belong to her, and whom we are far from confound- ing with pantheists, do not less misconceive her distinctive character. Since miracles, or, to speak more properly, since marvels have been made to give place, as conclusive proof, to moral evidence, they conclude that the super- natural is of no importance in the Christian creed. The conclusion is singular, since miracle, instead of being simply the proof of religion, is its very subject. Christianity rests entirely upon the idea, or rather on the fact of the super- natural intervention of Divine love to save a ruined world. When the doctrine of the fall and that of redemption have been taken away, and the system of the simple development of human nature, reaching its perfection in Jesus Christ, has been substituted for them, the very foundation is sapped. Christianity is bound up with the folly of the supernatural, and with it must either conquer or fall. To attempt to maintain it, while robbing it of this its truly characteristic feature, is to introduce intolerable anarchy into the world of thought. Our Christian deists are but timid representatives of the tendency we have been withstanding; they are bound to Jesus Christ only by a memory which, respectable as it may be, will not be able to hold its ground against the deeper elements of their creed — a creed which is at the farthest pole from the Gospel. The conclusion of this chapter then is, that the modem historians of Jesus have unjustly set aside at the outset the notion of the supernatural. We have established its possi- bility against pantheism, which only repudiates it because it denies God ; and against deism, which, in rejecting it, is false to its own principle of Divine liberty. There is no justification, therefore, for the d priori interdiction of the 28 BOOK FIRST. evidence of our Gospels. We may approach the sources of Christianity without going in quest of abstruse hypotheses, to bring it within the scope of natural order. It is not only this glorious history which is wronged by such a course ; it is history itself in its widest acceptation. Let liberty be Ignored, whether in God or man, and there remains but the shock of blind forces, or a sort of geometry, producing only abstract formulas, or a veritable natural history, in which physical conditions play the foremost part ; fatalism is the universal law, and all the interest and all the morality of the drama disappear. Under the influence of such princi- ples the history of the human race speedily becomes a confused chronicle. Deism doubtless rises higher than this, but it admits no other combatants than feeble creatures. How far more beautiful and touching is history, when it represents to us the fruitful wrestlings of Divine with human freedom, the former striving to assimilate the latter to itself, and to bring about that positive reconciliation which, embraced in all its consequences, will be the issue of this sublime conflict. I know no thought more elevating, more satisfying than this. God in history, a free God, a God of love, the God of con- science and of the Gospel, God carrying on His own scheme of restoration, with man, when man submits to Him, in spite of man, when he rebels, — ^this is the grand thought which should inspire these studies of histoiy, the purest literary glory of our age. The life of Jesus, then, fills its central place as the capital event to which all was tending in the ages anterior to it, and from which all proceeds in subsequent times ; it is the very key of the drama, which is neither a miserable farce nor a tragedy without a catastro- phe, but the sublime development of a Divine thought of pardon and salvation, wrought out through the conflicts and reactions of human freedom. rXSLIMmART QUXSTIOXS. 29 CHAPTER II. JBSUS CHRIST AND THS RSLIGIOKS OV THS PAST. TLJ ISTORY, according to the Christian statmnent of it, '^ "^ opens with a grand conflict between God and man. The free being, made king of the terrestrial creation, and designed to become its priest, fails nnder the mjrsterioos ordeal through which he has to pass, in order to learn that he is a free agent, and capable of good and evil. Conibond- ing liberty with the violation of the moral law, forgetting that this moral law is the basis of the higher life, he is ontnie to his destiny, and £dls under the heavy and d^;rad- ing yoke of nature. His rebellion has made him a slave, which is the fate of all false emancipation, for the creature cannot exist in absolute independence ; either he recognises the moral law, and then is divinely free, or he becomes the victim of his lower instincts and passions. In aUtntatir^g himself from his Creator, man severed himself from the very principle of Ufe ; this frtct tells what must be his late if he is left to himself. Christianity teaches that the free love which had called him into existence sovereignly in- terposed a second time to recover and save him. The generous pardon which covers his oflGmce, and breaks the fatal and logical sequence, by which death is the issue of evil, — this is the supernatural as apprehended in the very heart of God, at its origin, and in its principle. But moral hfe cannot be restored, as it was given, by a dimple act of Divine omnipotence. God created a free being with a word, but liberty once given carmot be violated even for the accomplishment of the work of restoration; else the restoration would be in reality the annihilation ol 30 BOOK FIRST. the moral creature. It is necessaiy, then, to bring about, progressively, a new harmony between the human will and the Divine, and this harmony will be a reconciliation, not only of God with man, but of man with God. God renounces His right to punish, but man must renounce his false claim to belong wholly to himself; he must retract his rebellion, and die to himself to give himself to God. Thus the reconciliation will be a double sacrifice, the Divine sacrifice of love which pardons, laying aside the right of irremissible punishment ; and the sacrifice of the human heart, which renounces its self-will, breaks or makes itseli an offering, penitently confessing past rebellions and accept- ing all their bitter consequences in the present. Now Christianity tells us that humanity is incapable by itself of this return of holy penitence. Therefore God does not leave it to its own impotence any more than to its condem- nation; He acts upon it from without by the « stem lessons of life, and by facts which serve as revelations; He acts upon it from within by the mysterious operations of His Spirit; He penetrates it more and more, till at length His eternal Word, life and light of the moral world, descends into it and assimilates it to Himself, so as to bo truly its representative. We shall see later what is to be understood by this assimilation, and by the reparative work of which it is the condition. For the present we will content ourselves with saying, that the God-man is the representative of humanity, not only because He took upon Him its likeness, but also because He answers its deepest aspirations; confused and impure in the masses of man- kind, these appear pure and luminous in the moral elect, who are in all ages the type of true humanity, I mean of that which alone fulfils its destiny. Hence a patient work of preparation precedes the coming of Christ It is carried on in two parallel lines, that of direct revelation in Judaism, and that of free experiment in paganism; the point of PBRfJMIWAltT QUESTIONS. 3t convergence is the universal expectation of the world at the time of the birth of Christ It is thus that the Redeemer deserves to be called the ** Desire of all nations,*' according to the sublime expression of Scripture, which comprises the highest philosophy of history. Such is the Christian statement. We are not called upon to justify, but simply to present it. It will be admitted that it is lacking neither in grandeur nor in respect for humanity. It does not need long dissertations to establish that it explains better than any other theory the history of our race. It alone gives an account of the general facts, universal indeed as humanity, which are found in all the systems of ancient civilisation, and the rudiment of which is discernible even in extreme barbarism. ' Religion is one of these universal facts ; in forms gross or refined, it everywhere rules the life of man ; it fashions it to its image, and no impress is to be compared with that which it leaves upon ages and nations. By this name of religion we do not mean simply a collection of beliefs or of ideas about the Deity ; religion is, above all else, an impe« nous instinct of the soul ; a need of the infinite, of peacci of pardon, of consolation, which becomes an anguish, an all* absorbing passion, before it is appeased. It is not born of physical fear, but of the terrors of conscience and the dread of the unknown; it is inspired, primarily, by the conscious* ness of guilt and pollution, and thus it impels men to sacrifices and purifications. The universal human fact is, then, not a vague natural religion, consisting of two or three dogmas; it is the passionate endeavour to reunite the broken link between humanity and Deity ; it is the quest of a sufficient atonement and a certain reconciliation with heaven. The succession or transformation of ancient religions proves the energy of the religious impulse ; it is a thirst too intense to be quenched by a few drops of a troubled wave. 32 BOOK FIRST. Each imperfect religion is only a halt in the ardent pursuit of an end ever retreating, for which, however, it is evident that man was made, from his inability to rest short of it. The appearance of art, wherever a new civilisation arises, reveals the same unrest, the same aspiration. According to the sublime and profound interpretation of Plato, man seeks to forget the cold and meagre reality of things to find the ideal beauty which lives in his memory. All great poetry is a rainbow formed of tears wrung from us by our actual miseries, and rays of glory from our noble origin. Philo* sophy, especially in the form which it wore in the ancient days of its glory, is the search after absolute truth, lying be- yond all theories in which the true and the false are blended ; it carries into a graver region the same regrets, the same aspirations which give birth to art. The succession, like . the multiplication of schools and of systems, evidences, after its manner, the same unalloyed thirst which we have shown in the domain of religion. Thus we find that man, in conditions favourable to his development, is an essentially religious being, but unsatisfied with his actual condition, ever seeking something better, feeling after a pacified God. Far from finding these aspira- tions to be dependent on external circumstances, or on the •progress of civilisation, we recognise their dimmed reflection even in the lowest religious conceptions. Their birthplace, then, is the soul itself. Man does not lift himself out of materialistic sensualism to the conception of the Deity; Buch a thought would never be educed from the whole collected body of natural phenomena ; man only infuses into these a divine idea, because the idea was previously within Jiim. It may be concluded, from the universality of this divine idea, that it formed part of the primeval treasure of ihe race, not borrowed from the outer world ; it descends irom a higher sphere ; it comes from God, and leads to Him D^ain. So far from the first rude forms of nature-worship PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 33 being the foundation of religion, these owe all their sacred character to the pre-existence of religion in the human heart. Assuredly man, fallen so low as to bow to the forces of nature, would never dream of defying these if the divine idea were not deeply inrooted, and if it had not at an earlier period possessed him wholly. Natural religions are only possible, in the degradation which is their basis, on the supposition that man lived in the first ages of the world a life so profoundly religious that, even in the depths of his fall, he cannot lose the memory or the need of it. Side by side with the religious is the moral instinct, the consciousness of obligation, of dependence, of relation to a higher and^ a Divine law — conscience, in short, which, con- vulsed and darkened as it often appears, is nevertheless the very foundation of social life ; supposing it wholly absent, neither the relations of family nor of state would be possible for a single day. It is at the basis of even the most defec- tive legislation ; banish the idea and the feelings of moral obligation, and all human relations become but conflicting elements of disorder. The moral united with the religious sentiment prevents man from living a mere animal exist- ence, from sinking into the sleep of sloth or sensuality ; it is a sharp double spur, which urges him painfully onward > in the eager pursuit of pardon and of righteousness. Man is, then, evidently placed under conditions most .favourable to the work of restoration ; and to be persuaded of the possi- bility of his recovery, it is enough to hear his plaint, and to catch his sigh even from the very bosom of outward prosperity. This race thus religiously organised has a history; God is constantly acting upon it to prepare it for perfect union with Himself. A single glance over the development ol ancient religions reveals this progressive preparation, re- tarded often by the false steps of the free creature man, but carried forward no less through his experiments and grop- 3 34 BOOK FIRST. ings after light in the depths of paganism, than by the direct revelations lodged in the bosom of Judaism. Here there must be no misunderstanding. The natural- istic school pretends that Christianity was not prepared but horn of the ancient world, that it is the product of its va- rious elements, and as it were the confluence of its streams, so that it can be explained by the simple concurrence or combination of natural causes. Christianity, on the con- trary, proclaims itself a divine work, a supernatural creation. Against such a claim are adduced the ideas and sentiments of the old world which had some analogy with its doctrine ; but it is only just to claim these as on its side, and to find in them a proof in its favour ; for if Christianity is not the 'product of humanity, it is none the less made for humanity, and promises to respond to its inmost needs. If this is the definitive religion, is it strange that there should have been desires after it and presentiments of it ? These analogies adduced against it are its points of contact with the race which it came to raise and save. Doubtless this could not be maintained if it had been preceded by an3rthing more than a presentiment of the good it brings, if there had been before it a religion or philosophy which had been able to give that which it promised. But there is none such ; it is found that the very epoch of loftiest aspiration is that of most radical and degrading impotence. Christianity is, then, so much the more necessary to the human soul, the more loudly the soul cries out for it by all its aspirations and pre- sentiments. To call up before a fallen race a noble ideal, which yet the race left to itself is powerless to realise, — ^this is the whole work of preparation ; for from the moment when man becomes conscious at once of his high destinies and of his utter helplessness, he is prepared to receive the Deliverer. We may not even attempt to sketch here the history of religions of antiquity. We will limit ourselves to PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 35 markings in a few touches, the principal stages of this long voyage of human thought. I. Historical glance at Ancient Paganism. When man attempted to raise himself from the depth oi the dark deep into which he had fallen, after the mysterious ordeal which precedes and inaugurates history, he began by the worship of nature ; unable to raise himself above her, equally unabl^ to abjure entirely the divine instinct within him, he deifies nature, and seeks in one and another of hei manifestations that higher power on which he feels himself dependent. Now, at the lowest stage of his development, he contents himself with a roughly-hewn fetich ; now he adores the unknown power in the sun, which seems to him to pour life and fertility into the earth ; or in the moon, which bathes the night with its serene splendours. Under this latter form, completed by a very simple anthromorphism which applies to the gods the law of the sexes, the religions of nature weighed during long ages upon western Asia. From Babylon to the deserts of Arabia, from Tyre to Car- thage, there are ever the same divinities under the various names of Bel and Melitta, of Baal and Baaltis, of Milcarth and Astarte; ever the same confusion of the kindly and severe attributes of nature, ever the same sanguinary and voluptuous worship, mingling murder with prostitution, to celebrate the divinity of birth and death. Grave, immobile Egypt, by the banks of its sacred stream, under the changeless blue of its sky, enfolds in fables of Asiatic origin the dream of a dim and uncertain immor- tality, ever bound to the permanence of the mortal remains. She breathes a new inspiration into the legend of the young god, dead and made alive again, who is no longer Adonis^ but Osiris. The purely natural symbolism of the rising and falling of the Nile no more contents her; a vague hope glimmers in the pale realm of the dead, since Osiris has 36 BOOK FIRST. penetrated it, and there sits enthroned as judge and king ol souls. But Egypt goes no farther ; she only half shakes off the fetters of Asiatic materialism, which revives in her gross symbolism. We rise a step higher with the religion inaugurated by Zoroaster six centuiies before Christ; we escape from the incoherent blending of good and evil, which was fatal to the moral consciousness at Babylon : in nature, as in human life, a great combat is waged between two decidedly hostile powers; religion is a holy war, and its chief manifestation is through the noble organ of thought, — language which by prayer ascends to heaven ; the concep* tion of immortality and of judgment becomes more pure. Still this noble religion hovers between dualism and pantheism ; it has not truly passed beyond the circle of the religions of nature, for it perpetually identifies moral facts with those which are natural. The fatal circle of naturalism is completed in India, in the heart of that Aryan race so richly gifted, with mind so subtle and brilliant, which from the most remote ages has given birth to the metaphysics of pantheism and pushed it to its farthest issues. When this race awoke to the life of thought it was at the foot of the Caucasus, where it still clustered in a fresh dawn, under a radiant sky, and by murmuring waters: it saw its gods in the natural phe- nomena, which charmed it; it praised, under the name of Indra, the young and dazzling light ; it had hymns for the two first rays of morning, those first-bom of the day; hymns, too, for the dew and for the limpid life-giving stream. Fire is worshipped as a winged being which shines on the hearth, as the golden bird which shines on earth, as a sovereign victor who has smoke for his standard. Thus was born in the Vedas that naturalism which had all the freshness and poetry of childhood, and which was the common source whence the Aryan race drew their widely differing religions. While the Gaul and the Teuton, in their sombre forests, and PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 37 under often-clouded skies, are inaugurating a solemn, some- times even tragical worship, directed to the invisible, tinged with thoughts of expiation and of immortality, and trans- fused with a consciousness of decay; the Indian race, nursed in the lap of luxuriant and lavish nature, breathes an enchanted life. There it seeks the infinite, and discerns it not in the various manifestations of nature, but in its hidden principle, which is Brahma, and bums to bs united to him in the heart of that silent deep, whence streams the flood of universal life. Hence its yearning to be lost in the vague and intangible divinity which is everything and yet nothing, to merge in it the consciousness of individual being; hence its asceticism, and that ecstasy — the closing utterance of Brahminism and the opening word of Buddhism — ^which, with its designs of reformation and purified moral ideas, aims at annihilation, which it calls Nirvana^ and only breaks the inflexible framework of caste to plunge the whole race into the infinite void. The latter developments of Buddhism, the most remarkable of which is the Trimurti^ or the Indian Trinity, are only varied attempts to realise this absorption of the finite in the infinite and the absolute. The multiplied incarnations of Vishnu, who takes now one human form and now another, like an actor changing his part, denote a strange contempt for moral personality; the spark- ling poetry of Hindoo pantheism covers a wide, troubled sea of negations. It is not less removed from Christianity than Asiatic naturalism, and if it appeals to it by its ardent aspi- rations after the union of the human with the divine, it pre- sents no other point of contact than this vague sentiment. Naturalism as it touches the shores of Greece undergoes a transformation ; we see it narrowing and contracting the vague lines of its horizon as it touches that wondrous land, which seems, in its very natural conformation, the worthy amphitheatre prepared for heroic conflicts. The idea of symmetrical beauty breathes in its pure harmonious lines. 38 BOOK FIRST. which Stand out in all their clearness of perspective in the tender light. It is there, on the shores of that sea of count- less creeks, under that heaven, brilliant but never burning, that man awakes to know himself as more beautiful, more mighty than the outer world, and makes gods in his own likeness. In place of engulfing himself in an absorbing vortex of deity, he seeks to find himself in the object of his adoration ; he carves his own idealised image in the marble: and this is his god. The heroic age had lifted him above himself; the god was only a hero placed upon the altar. The Hellenes worshipped themselves in the ravishing types of marvellous beauty. Thus Greece opposes the apotheosis of the heroic to the Indian incarnations, and solves the re- ligious problem in a directly inverse manner; for instead of absorbing the finite in the infinite, she enshrines the divine in a fair but finite form. It might seem that she was doomed by this wholly ter- restrial tendency to an ever frivolous religion. Far other- wise; the divine shines out much more clearly in man than in nature, for he possesses moral life, and in virtue of that he touches the higher sphere. Hence humanism was not solely a religion of artists ; the moral element appeared in it with greater power than in any other worship. The con- ception of the Deity became more pure. The Olympian gods represented not simply passions, but virtues. Con- science lifted her voice, and proclaimed " those unwritten laws in which lives a God, who ages not." In ^schylus she fulminated the mysterious anathema, just meed of crime, which hangs over the most fortunate of royal races ; she showed, under the brilliant garniture of earth, that blood shed by the murderer's hand which never congeals. She dared even to predict, by the voice of poets, a grand religious renovation, the victory of a young god of the future, whose dart should transpierce Jupiter, and set free the ancient cap- tive of the Caucasus, the faithful image of humanity quiver- PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 39 ing under the bondage of a worn-out worship. In Sophocles, conscience evoked a moral idea full of purity and delicacy, grand and touching as devotion — I had almost said as charity.* This noble poetry had tones truly prophetic to re- present the passage from life to death, which makes our twilight shades give place to the calm glories of eternity, f But the true prophet of Greece was Socrates. He appears as a reformer of thought and manners in the most brilliant, the most active circle of civilisation, in an age corrupted by the scepticism of the sophists. Bringing man back to him- self, not to intoxicate him with pride, but, on the contrary, to show him his weakness, he led him to find in his own con- science the basis of all certainty, and the revelation of the just God veiled by so many myths. "The soul of man," he «aid, " is a partaker of the divine.*' If he reminded him of bis obligation and his immortal destinies, he insisted on the solidarity of the true and the good ; he exalted the moral character of learning and the holiness of truth in an age when philosophy was little more than a frivolous sport. Finally, he lived according to his light, and died for his doctrine. We do not hesitate to hail in him a precursor of Christ; he went before, preparing His way, in the midst of much darkness and uncertainty. His teaching, interpreted and expanded by Plato, has become at once the most active solvent of polytheism, and the highest manifestation of the moral idea among the ancients. But in order to hail in this gicat school even the initiative of positive religion, we must foiget its blanks and, ab3ve all, itsdualistic errors so marked in Plato, who could not reach the idea of a God truly free, sovereign of the material ; and who finally confounded Him with the abstract and impersonal unity to which he sacrificed all individual rights and even moral personality itself. This philosophy was powerless to reform Greece ; by Hellenic and aristocratic exclusiveness it voluntarily enclosed itself See Aotigone. f Close ot (Edipus at Colonus. 4a BOOK FIRST within the boundaries of a little country, and the limits of a privileged class. The odious theory of the conquest and subjection of the barbarians, the justification of slavery, and even of the slave trade, — did not these receive their most exact statement in the system of Aristotle, very few years after the death of Plato ? This noble philosophy could indeed reveal better things, but it had no power to deter from the accomplishment of the worse. It blasted the ancient faith, and for the honour of deity it was right ; but it substituted for it only a high ideal and a creed incapable of enkindling the heart. Men accepted its negations, and passed by its grand moralities, and the sceptics reappeared, only girded with better armour. Epicurism repeated in its manner the famous maxim, ** Know thyself," and conducted man to a merely sensuous life. Stoicism started from the same basis to end in a life of severity ; but it never assumed in Greece that austere character which made it so grand at Rome. In vain the troubled soul fell back upon mysterious modes of worship, which were only a return to the old natural religions some- what purified ; the mysteries of Eleusis, beautiful and touch- ing in their recognition of the immortality of the soul, gave no more real satisfaction than the purifications attached to the worship of Apollo at Delphos, or the hidden doctrines which permeated all the mysteiies, and which, under the name of Orphism, revived oriental pantheism. Of all this grand movement of thought, of this civilisation, so versatile and brilliant, the final utterance in the time of Alexander was still the Socratic doctrine; this remained the culminating point of Hellenic development. It was a very elevated ideal, but incomplete and often contradictory; it superseded the popular religion without replacing it, and without making a really powerful impression on souls, on private or public life. It is, then, a vast exaggeration of the influence and scope of the work of the great master of ancient wisdom, to Attribute to him the honour of having laid the foundation of PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 4t Christianity. On this theory the Gospel must be reduced, as Baur * reduces it, to a mere return to the inner life, and all the weak points of Platonism must be passed over in silence, as they are by Strauss.t The conquests of Alexander had the effect of breaking, in some measure, the narrow mould of nationality, in which till then pagan civilisation had been held. By mingling races and religions, by founding a city which was as a point of junction for the different currents of human thought, he con- tributed to bring about the new era, in which the great idea of humanity should rise above all local distinctions. The conquest of the world by Rome, and the terrible levelling line which she stretched over all the nations that she sub- jugated, tended to the same end. We do not deny the pro- vidential character of these events, which were to facilitate the progress of Christianity, by opening a wider field to ils mission; but it must not be forgotten that the idea of ths unity of the human race was always very imperfect before the Gospel. It was favoured under paganism, rather by the growing feebleness of the patriotic virtues than by higher and wider views. It is certain that Epicurism, with its desire for repose and its worship of pleasure, corrupted while it softened manners ; and while it stifled the fiercer passions extinguished at the same time the love of country. Human- ism, sceptical and voluptuous, was coincident with the loss of liberty, and the oblivion of those manly virtues which had stirred and ennobled public life in the democracies of Greece. It was not so much the recognition of a new and more exalted claim as the weak surrender of perilous obligations. { Energy and vigour were all on the side of the proud and * Baur, *' Geschichte der drei ereten Jahrfa. der Kirche," p. 4. 4 Strauss, *' Leben Jesu," p. 182. X See, on all this movement of Greek philosophy, the beautiful book of M.Jules Denys, on **L*Histoire des Id^es Morales dans rAntiquiti." Convinced, as the author is, that morals had already reached their purest form at this time, his sincerity and learning lead him to admit very important limitations. 42 BOOK FIRST. hardy race, which had patiently pursued its fixed design of conquering the world. We must admit that the Roman people was a strange apostle of the unity of the human race. Its conception of this unity was singular ; it held, beyond question, that humanity had but a single head, but that head was to bow under its iron yoke. It aspired to reunite all the nations of the universe, but this aspiration was much more the expression of its vaulting ambition than of its expanded views. When in the circus, crowded with the Roman populace, the captive Gaul was made to mingle his blood With that of the Teuton and the Parthian, it would be hard to trace, in the brutal scene, the progress of the humani- tarian idea. No 1 not in this school of fierce rapacity and implacable severity could the ancient world learn the great lessons of the moral unity of mankind. That a great spirit like Cicero felt a presentiment of the truth we admit, but this did not prevent the advocate of Sicily, so eloquent against Verres, from defending the exactions of which the pro-consul Fonteius had been guilty to Gaul. * The love of the human race was a sublime utterance — a lightning gleam in the darkness ; but in order to reach the popular concience such sentiments needed other exponents than base Epicu- reans, implacable conquerors, or half-sceptical Platonists. A refined philosophy opposes the divine unity to the fables of polytheism ; it speaks of the rights of the slave, and makes itself the shield of the feeble and unhappy. The ideal shines out with all the purer radiance for being so foiled by the real. That the games of strength had never been more bloody and terrible, that oppression had never been Heavier, and the respect for common superstitions more loosely held, let Cicero be the witness, who made a social necessity of the official observance of the religion of the states, and who concealed himself in the gardens ot Tuscu- lum, in order to express doubts at once bold and prudent. * Denys, ii. 44. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 43 Thus, on the eve of Christianity, fervent aspirations are rising from the midst of universal impotence and degrada- tion : devouring flames they are, which, having no other ali- ment, fall back upon the hearts whence they spring, and consume them. Under the load of misery, of tyranny, ot scepticism and corruption which oppresses it, pagan hu- manity heaves a long sigh of weariness and woe : now it seeks in material pleasure the satisfaction of its infinite craving, and plunges into depths of sensuality, which reveal its blind and restless intensity ; now it curses its gods with a sort of frenzy, and rises into an impiety born of despair ; or, again, it sits in mourning over that mythology, fair but futile, of which the approaching end is foretold in poetic legends ; now, by a secret instinct, it turns its gaze towards the east, asking deliverance from the arts of the magician, or from mysterious oracles, the echo of which has reached it. Thus the commencement of our era is marked by a very peculiar condition of soul, represented in the literature of the times — a blending of degradation, morbid voluptuous- ness, effete scepticism, and restless aspiration. This attitude of the spiritual world found its most perfect symbol in the inscription, ** To the Unknown God,** which Paul read at Athens, over one of the countless altars of that idolatrous city. It is not, in fact, a more complete doctrine, but a new divine manifestatiofi, that the world is waiting for. We do not deny that some few of the social reforms of the Gospel were faintly anticipated at this time ; but of what avail is a floating, cloudy idea, which is incapable of transfusing itself into heart and act ? What is it, after all, but a distracting ideal invoking a manifestation of power to realize it ? The higher the ancient world is lifted in an ideal point of view, without losing sight of its uncertainties and fatal errors, the more palpable is the need for a new religion, which with /Ight should bring strength. If we press more closely this ideal, or this aspiration of 44 BOOK FIRST. pagan humanity, we shall see that it goes far beyond the vague intuition of the divine unity or the presentiment of some social reforms. That which the soul asks is a recon- ciliation between herself and God ; it is the restoration of the union between the human nature and the divine. Under the most diverse fables, and athwart gross errors, we disco- ver the same fixed and ardent craving for a great expiation. There is more than this. The idea of a deliverer, of a Messiah, is not less universal. It is found in India, in the legend of Buddha, the saviour-reformer; in Persia, in that of Methra, the future vanquisher of evil powers ; in Greece, in the fable of Prometheus ; and in Scandinavia, in that god^ mightier than Odin, who is to save the world, and whose name may not be uttered. Thus does the general aspiration of humanity find expression, when freed from all the ancient forms of worship, and when these old faiths were drawing near to each other in a common decay ; when to the exultant youth of valiant races succeeded a premature decline, an era of slavery and decadence, though abundant in material and intellectual riches. The Greco- Roman paganism of this epoch might have used, to express itself in its better tenden- cies, that mournful utterance of a young Roman : ** Tossed from doctrine to doctrine, I was more unhappy than ever ; and, carried along by a whirlwind of conflicting ideas, from the depths of my so«l I sighed."* II. The religion of the Old Testament. A strange people appears in the very centre of the ancient world, a people wholly separated from all which surrounds it ; solitary, and yet conscious of a universal mission ; the jealous guardian of its religious traditions, and yet with face steadfastly set towards the future. Such is the people of Israel. It has neither the brilliant and metaphysical genius of India, nor the artistic fecundity of Greece, nor the con- • " Recognitiones,*' chap. i. PRBLIMINAKT QUESTIONS. 45 quering ardour of Rome ; it is rude and obstinate ; it be- comes an object of animadversion as soon as it is known to other nations. And yet it has obtained, in the realm of religion, the pre-eminence which belongs to Greece in the domain of art, and to Rome in that of power. It has con- quered mankind, of which it was the scorn, and has cast down before its terrible and invisible God all those idols of marble and gold, all that graceful and poetic paganism which had flourished in the midst of the most favoured races. Israel, in faict, is devoted wholly to the highest religious idea : take away that idea and it has no longer power even to guard its own hearths ; while, proscribed and exiled, it finds a fatherland on a foreign shore, so soon as the great thought which constitutes its nationality revives within it. The Jew is neither soldier nor poet nor philoso- pher : he is priest and prophet. This is his part in the old world, and it is for this that he is made peculiariy the fore- runner, the preparer of paths for the Redeemer. Doubtless there is to be found, moreover, that blending of fear and hope which characterises religion before Christ, when it is still a desire and a quest rather than a calm assurance. The work of preparation consists, as we have seen, precisely in inflam- ing this desire, and carrying it to the point at which it be- comes an intense, urgent supplication, crying out not only for Divine succour, but for God Himself to supply an absolute need. Hence, through all the ages and all the civilisation of the ancient world, in the midst of outbursts of evil and violent convulsions of the outward life, that universal lan- guage of the human heart, the cry of grief and anguish, the utterance of hope — ^in a word, all that is the most elevated in poetry, in art, and in religious fable. Hence that universal institution of priesthood and sacrifice, which proves that mankind feel themselves, as a body, afar off from God, and unworthy to approach Him, but that they cherish, neverthe- less, the hope of mediation. The existence of a priesthood 46 BOOK FIRST. is the widest and strongest expression of the desire after salvation ; for it betokens at once the natural estrangement in which man finds himself from God, and the presentiment of a future reconciliation. Now, this idea of priesthood is the very essence of Judaism, since there is not one of its institutions which does not rest on the separation of a people, chosen from the rest of mankind, for the service of the whole race. It realises, therefore, the universal idea of the priest- hood ; but, in doing so, raises it to a height at which it is freed from all which marred it in the pantheistic and poly- theistic religions. Thus Judaism is nothing else than the general religion of the period of preparation, purified indeed and spiritualised, but resting on the same ground of feeling and inspiration as all the other worship of that age. Only, there is a difference so great between the form which this general religion has assumed in the holy books of the Jev/s and the degraded forms under which it appears elsewhere, that it is impossible to attribute this superiority to a mere historical and natural development. We know what the conception of God becomes in the religions of nature, even in the more refined. Greek hu- manism fails to free it from the bounds of the finite: it com- promises it in the confused and impure encounter of human passions ; and when philosophy tries to release it, it is bi)t changed into an abstract idea without life. What an im- measurable distance is there between the Jehovah of the Bible and the Indra of the Vedas, the Jupiter of the Iliad, or the god of Pindar and of Plato I From its first utterance Scripture claims dominion over the world of mind by a free creation. God is not the sun, for He made it. He said, '< Let there be light, and there was light." He is the abso- lute, the free, the sovereignly wise. Is His majesty terrible ? is He called the High and Holy One ? — the Father which is in heaven appears with forgiveness even in the midst of terrors. ** And God said unto Moses, / am that I am : and PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 47 He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, / am hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover untj Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God ot Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you : thte is my name for ever." * What metaphysical formula will embrace in fewer words a more sublime idea ? The Lord who calls Himself / am that I am^ is the God of the fathers: He is Himself the father who punishes and who protects. The Old Testament throughout is resplendent with His gloiy, like the sanctuary which Isaiah beheld in a vision; in it, too, are heard those voices answering one to another, and crying, " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory." The Bible does not reveal to us only the one sovereign God, but also the God of conscience. Him whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity, and who yet is ** slow to anger," " and pardons abundantly, knowing that we are but dust." t On the idea entertained of God depends the idea that will be formed of sin and of purification. Whatever, therefore, may be the part accorded to the intuitions of conscience, outside the bounds of Judaism, it must be admitted that they are invariably coloured by pagan superstition. The natural religions identify moral evil with physical ; or, as in the extreme East, they confound it with finite existence itself, so that moral purification is only a magical act, to ap- pease a maleficent power, or a wild asceticism, designed to destroy individuality. Greece, in spite of her fine flashes of light and noble institutions, knew neither the secret of a worthy repentance, nor of efficient consolation. There can be no comparison between the moral life of Greece and the pathetic drama which is enacted in the conscience of a pious Israelite. The conceptions of the latter of the highest developments of holiness are still very incomplete, but his • Exodus iii. 14, 15. f Psalm ciii. 48 BOOK FIRST. ideal leaves far behind the best aspirations of the pagan world. The Divine law is his absolute rule, his constant aim, and also his torment, because he measures the distance which separates him from it. He lives in the presence of a righteous God, under the terror of His judgments, but with his whole soul pervaded by a gratitude which can never equal the benefits received. Thus a moral life, deep and earnest, is formed and moulded, a life which is grandest in its sufferings, and in that ardent craving for purification, which finds but an incomplete answer in the sacrifices and holocausts through which conscience catches a dim glimpse of definitive satisfaction. At length, in place of vague presentiments, arises a steadfast hope, which illuminates the future with glowing splendours. Whence comes, then, this superiority of the religion of the Old Testament, which is even more striking on the first glance than that of Christianity 7 Judaism, in fact, by its isolation, rears itself in the ancient world like a steep and solitary summit, while the Gospel extends its empire over mankind far beyond the point where positive faith ceases ; for it has permeated with its influence the moral atmosphere which we breathe. Was it on the barren sand of the desert, where he first pitched his tent, that the Shemite read the name of the One Holy God ? Can it be true that it was more easy for him to lift his soul to the Invisible One from the arid solitudes of Syria and Arabia, than if he had had to rise above the enchantments of a richly gifted land ? One might conceive him led by these gloomy wastes into a mournful pantheism ; but were they more apt to declare the God of conscience than the starry sky where the Chaldean found only hiS solar God ? The desert is a blank page upon which the soul writes that which she carries within herself; by itself it reveals nothing to man ; rather it overwhelms him by its vague, melancholy vastness, which could never originate the thought of a personal God, that is of the In- PRELIMINARY QOBSTIONS. 49 finite, living, and free. If the genins of the race he invoked to solve the problem, we ask how the Hebrew, with a mind far from supple, and without philosophic inspiration, should have been able, at one bound, to leave behind Plato and Aristotle, and all the subtle dreamers of India ? Again, if there is one well-attested fact, it is the constant predis- position of the Hebrew to idolatry at the very period when his religion was being developed ; he was only held to mono- theism by constraint, and needed incessantly the most severe chastisements to bring him back from his idolatries. So soon as he yields to his own bent he becomes a worshipper of Baal, and ten tribes out of the twelve go over definitively to a modified paganism. If, then, his religion come to him neither from the earth which he treads, nor from the blood which Hows in his veins, it must have descended from heaven. We recog^se on it the seal of a revelation not given all at once, but progressive, adapted to the times, the ignorance, and the feebleness of the people who were to be assimilated to it so as to be its guardians. We find, then, in Judaisnv in a purified and spiritualised form, the true religion of the epoch of the preparation, of which we have traced else- where the crude idea ; the general action of God upon man- kind at large is concentrated upon one privileged people; but this concentration itself is for the good of all the other nations, who, along the path of free experiment, and by re- peated g^opings in the dark, are to arrive at the same point as the chosen race, under the discipline of a more direct education. The election of Israel expresses perfectly the normal relation of man with God before the Redemption ; and this great religious fact, which has in it nothing arbitrary, but is founded on the reality of things, is to contribute in an effectual manner to develop that desire afifcer salvation, which is the best preparation for salvation itself. Israel is the priest of humanity in the preparatory period. It is 4. 50 BOOK widely aepaiated from all sunoanding peoples, enclosed within the land of promise as in a sanctuaiy, forbidden all unholy intercourse, even more positively by the stem inter- dictions of its law, than by its high mountain barrier and the inhospitable strand of its coast.* Still this people, accused of hating the human race, knows that in its poste- rity all the nations of the earth are to be blessed, f and it is this grand element which constitutes its priesthood. Its moral isolation does not prevent its ^.cting repeatedly on the nations of history with which it comes in contact ; thus, despised as it is, it exercises a considerable ascendancy, especially towards the close of the old world ; its influence is like leaven hidden in the universal fermentation ol thoughts and aspirations. The priesthood of Israel is an absolute consecration to a holy God. The chief of the race was called out from his family by a mysterious and sovereign command; he walked among men as a pilgrim without a country, a servant of the most high God, pitching or taking up his tent upon a sign of the Divine will. The sojourn in Egypt, thanks to the cruel persecutions of the Pharaohs, entailed upon the descendants of Abraham no unholy intermingling with the heathen. They came forth from the land of bond- age, as they entered it, ever mariced with that strange seal, which is at once their reproach and their glory. Moses in the desert impresses this seal yet more deeply upon them by the institutions which he gives, every one tending to bind them more closely to the holy and dreadful God. His law sounded to them like thunder from Sinai; and its terror remained upon them. That law consists not alone in those great general precepts, which raise to such an elevation the moral idea, but in a thousand prescriptions of detail and minute ritual which' are to hem them round ; it takes possession of their whole life, as well of the most * Exodus xzzlv. X2. f Geneais xii. 31. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 5I indifferent actions as of the most important, bringing the whole within the scope of a divine consecration. Whether they are celebrating worship, or sitting at the family table ; whether they are at their ordinary occupations, cultivating their fields and vineyards, or paying funeral honours to their dead ; upon every scene breaks a moral reflection like a flash from Sinai; everywhere the law demands that which is not yielded to it, and leaves in its wake dread and repent- ance. That which appears small and superficial in the legal appointments, is just that which constitutes the unity of this truly sacerdotal life. The especial priesthood of the family of Aaron is only a delegation of the priesthood of the entire nation, as is evidenced by the oflering of redemption which was brought to God on the birth of every firstborn.* The erection of the Sanctuary, the Sabbath, the solemn feasts, are all designed to set forth still more prominently the idea of sanctity, by the redoubled consecration, if one may so speak, of the place and the days in which Jehovah is especially wor- shipped. The centre of this worship is sacrifice. A deep, conscious need of expiation possesses this people, who are confronted with so stem a law, and who walk under this terrible sentence, ''Cursed is he that continueth not in all the words of this law to do them.^f Thus the blood of bulls and of goats flows ceaselessly upon the altar of Jehovah, without ever allaying the thirst for pardon, even on the great day of expiation, when, amidst magnificent solem- nities, the high priest, not content with the first slain victim, lays the sins of the people on the scapegoat, and sends it into the wilderness. All these purifications were but symbols and types, and served only to arouse and keep awake the want of pardon and of an eflicacious sacrifice. Thus did the law, by troubling the conscience, fulfil its stem but salutary mission in the work of preparation. * Exodus ziii. 13. f Deuteronomy xxvii. 26. ^2 BOOK FIRST. The grand prophetic thought which is the soul of Judaism is to be found at the very basis of its permanent institu- tions ; these, in fact, incompetent as they are to satisfy the feelings which they help to foster, can have only a sym- bolical or typical value. It is needful, however, that this thought should be constantly disengaged from the rites and forms under which it might else remain buried. Prophecy, properly so called, performs this necessary function. Like the Aaronic priesthood, it is only the more forcible ezpres« sion of a characteristic which belongs to the entire people. Israel is the great prophet, no less than the great priest, of the ancient world. It has not only preserved, like othei nations, a faint echo of the promise given in Eden ; it knows that this promise will only reach its full accomplish- ment through itself. With ^aze turned towards the future, it is in an attitude of mysterious expectation, ever asking itself if the deliverance is not at hand. Each generation clothes the great event in the colours most familiar to it, idealising its own present. A grand hope illuminates the oldest documents of the Hebrew religion; it goes far beyond the temporal benedictions in which it is enwrapped; hence, when these blessings are realised, the waiting soul is in no way satisfied, because the more excellent promise is yet unfulfilled. It is evident, for instance, that after the conquest of the land of Canaan, and the multiplication oi the race of Abraham, the most glorious of the prophecies made to the father of the faithful is not yet accomplished ; all the families of the earth are not yet blessed in Abraham's seed.* Each partial accomplishment of the promises is like the starting-point for a larger hope> which grows in a manner on successive disappointments. It is thus that prophecy goes hand in hand with history. Vague and general in its beginnings, it is ever tending to greater pre* cision ; soon it is not only a deliverance which is looked * Genesis xii. 3. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 53 for, but a deliverer. The hope of Messiah is the very soul of the Old Testament ; everything in nature and in history is made to symbolise Him. When, in the breath of spring, Carmel puts on his glory, when the hills, clad in their daz- zling vesture, shout for joy, when the fir tree and the myrtle fling their aroma on the air, when the springs from the hill- chambers carry new verdure into the fertile plains ; by such a scene — the full beauty of which can only be appreciated by one who knows the mournful barrenness which goes before it — the pious Israelite pictures to himself the new earth, wherein righteousness shall dwell when Messiah's great renovating work is done."^ But history has yet brighter gleams to cast upon the future. Each of her periods furnishes a new symbol to represent the Divine Deliverer. In the most ancient oracles preserved by the holy books of the Jews, when mankind consisted of but a single family. He calls Himself ''the seed of the woman," and it is He who is to crush the power of evil.t In the patriarchal age, a child of Abraham is promised, who is to bring deliverance to all the nations of the earth. J After Moses, He appears in the aspect of a prophet, like the mighty lawgiver of Israel: ** A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you like unto me ; Him shall ye hear." § In the time of the kings, Messiah is to be the King of the future, the ideal David ; to Him are applied in a pre- eminent sense all the glorious or pathetic ascriptions with which the royal prophet has filled his psalms; for in the theocracy every event, trouble, or triumph is only an augury and preparation of the definitive era. Everything in the holy book points to Messiah without the necessity of sup- posing in the soul of the prophet a factitious double per* * See Isaiah Iv. 12, 13. { Genesis xii. 3. f Genesis iii. 15. } Deuteronomy xviii. z8* 54 BOOK FIRST. sonality, which would make Him pass, without transition, from the utterance of his own sentiments to that of an impersonal oracle. No ; David sang truly his own joys and sorrows, but he, none the less, spoke also in prophetic utterance for that mysterious descendant, who alone was to realise in its perfection, the t3rpe of the man of God. In the period which follows the full development of the theocracy under a single sceptre — ^a troubled epoch in which the worship of Jehovah was often eclipsed, and idolatry and corruption made perpetual inroads upon the chosen people in both its divisions — Messiah is contem- plated as the servant of the Lord ; the righteous reformer of religion, who should restore justice and concord, should put an end to violence, and establish universal peace on a renovated earth. ** The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and might, The spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord t And shall make Him of quick understanding in the fear of ths LocdL He shall not judge dfter the 6ip;ht of His eyes, Neither reprove after the hearing of His ears ; But with righteousness shall He judge the poor. And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth : And He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, And with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, And faithfulness the girdle of His reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, And the leopard shall lie down with the kid." — Isaiah xi. 2 — 6. He it is, this King who shall reign in righteousness^ who is to be " as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'** He shall write the law of the Lord, not again on tables of stone, but on the heart of the true Israel.f He shall gather all nations, and set up His standard in the midst of the people. | When the rebellious nation is carried into exile, when ^ Isaiah xxxii. z, 2. f Jeremiah xxxi. 33, 34. X ^^^^^ ^clix. 22. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 55 the long procession of its sons and daughters is led into a strange land, when the captives hang their '* harpa on the willows by the waters of Babylon," prophecy has but one S3nnbol, as Zion has but one thought — return to the beloved country. " They shall come with weeping," says Jeremiah, " and with supplications will I lead them: I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble." * The second part of Isaiah is a touching and sublime picture of the return of the exiles, but a picture so grand that it plainly embraces a deliverance infinitely greater than that from the captivity of Babylon. In fact, all nations are to share in the triumph of the people of Abraham and of David. Like doves to their windows, they shall flock from all parts of the world to shelter in the refuge divinely opened for all. The desert which '' shall rejoice and blos- som as the rose," is not simply the waste land of Judaea; it is the forgiven earth. The daughter of Zion stretches the covering of her tent, and pacified heaven is the pavilion which guards the enlarged family of God. Messiah was given for a witness to all people ; He calls the ** sons of the strangers," and opens the fountain of life to all who are athirst.f The visions of Ezekiel, no less than the strains of the later Isaiah, compel us to admire the lofty scope of the prophecy of the exile, although they bear the impress of a complicated and clearly Chaldaic symbolism. The prophet insists forcibly on a moral renovation, on an inward change, which is to replace the heart of stone by a heart of flesh. Jeremiah has no more touching tones than these : ** As a shepherd seeking out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. . • • I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord God." % In the world of the Old Testament there • Jeremiah xxxi. 9. f Iwiah Ix. { Ezekiel xxxlv. 13—15, $6 BOOK FIRST. is no broader picture than the vision of the dry bones, — the symbol of the spiritual resurrection of Israel. * The most important result of this prophetic period is the new feature added to the type of Messiah, the feature of suffering. This deliverer, this king who is to establish the throne in righteousness, will be at the same time that ser- vant of the Lord, who ** shall not cry nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street," that gentle Saviour who will not ** break the bruised reed," nor " quench the smoking flax.*'t He will be the pure and spotless victim by whose Bufferings we are to be healed, the Lamb slain for His people. The royal Branch of Isaiah will be like ''a root out of a dry ground ; " Messiah shall be called a ^* Man of sor- rows." X This is the great lesson which prophecy gathers in the school of humiliation and suffering, and it is from these days of storm and darkness, to employ Ezekiel's image, that the Divine Spirit sends forth His most vivid splendours. The prophets of the return only prolong the echo of these great oracles of the seers of the exile. The tribulations and humiliations of that period are the strongest evidence that in the future must be sought the realisation of those magni- ficent promises, which were followed by the gradual decline of Judaism. The function of the prophet is not alone to bring to the people the oracles, which proclaim chastisement and de* liverance ; he is the witness of God in their midst. He is not a son of the sanctuary by hereditary priesthood ; his is a more direct call, received sometimes on the steps of the throne, as in the case of Zephaniah, sometimes among the sheepfolds, as by Amos ; he is raised up in Israel to breathe perennial life into that round of institutions, which might easily become petrified into the legalism of the formalist. He represents the spirit ever animating the letter. He is the present and living word of the Lord, uttering His pro- • Eickicl xxvii. t Isaiah xlii. i^-j. { Isaiah liu. PRELIMIKARY QUESTIONS. 57 test against all the deviations from the theocracy. He writes down the sin of the people with a pen of iron, and lays the axe of Divine justice at the root of every tree which Jehovah has not planted. When Israel, forgetful of his vo- cation, will lean upon the stranger, the prophet interposes ; he announces the judgments of God on idolatrous nations, and makes them recoil in all their weight on the stiff-necked people, whose wanderings and rebellions he depicts with burning fervour. The prophet is thus as much the repre- sentative of law as of mercy; he unites in his person the double office of the old covenant, which is at once fear and hope, and which brings consolation only out of the terrors of conscience. The national history, interpreted by the prophet, sets in full light the abomination of sin, the wrath of God, and His mercy. Thus a deep repentance is pro- duced in the heart, a bitter dew which alone can fertilise the soil out of which shall grow the Divine Branch promised to mankind. Prophecy is no way hostile to the priesthood, but it marks the insufficiency of this jealous guardian of the institutions of Moses. When Hosea says that God " desires mercy, and not sacrifice," * he only gives formal oracular utterance to that which was from the first the cry of the penitent. "Thou desirest not sacrifice," exclaims David, in the bitterness of his repentance, ** else would I give it ; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." t Assuredly the work of preparation was far advanced when the revelation of conscience came to confirm that of the law and the prophets, by that agonising cry which is still the truest expression of penitence : ** Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy loving-kindness ; according unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me * Hosea vi. 6. f Psalm 11. i8, 19. 58 BOOK FIRST* from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned. • • • Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.*'* The progress was still more marked when, in the name of the whole nation, was offered that prayer of con- fession, which loses none of its value whatever may be its date : ** O Lord, the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love Him, and to them that keep His commandments ; we have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have re- belled, even by departing from Thy precepts and from Thy judgments ; neither have we hearkened unto Thy ser- vants the prophets, which spake in Thy name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. O LfOrd, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against Thee. O my God, incline Thine ear, and hear; open Thine eyes, and behold our desolations. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive."t It is impossible to enter now into the controversy raised upon the book from which these beauti- ful words were taken. It cannot be questioned that in it prophecy assumes an entirely new character of precision, especially in its relation to the general history of mankind ; for in it, for the first time, the succession of the great em- pires is pointed out with minute detail. Its symbolism is less simple than that of the classic prophets ; it is compli- cated and sometimes fanciful. The animal t)rpology familiar to Persia plays a great part in it. No book has been more variously interpreted than that attributed to Daniel ; it is like the transition stage between the prophetic, properly so called, and the apocalyptic. But the inspiration which animates it is so pure, that we do not hesitate to give it its rank in the truly sacred literature of the Jews. Jesus Christ • Psalm li. t I>aniel it. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 59 explicitly recognised its religious value by invoking its testimony. We have endeavoured to elicit the general and dominant thought of the Old Testament. We admit that it is obscured often by the barbarism of the times, which is depicted with an unshrinking candour. The falls and crimes of the most illustrious founders of the theocracy are related with no pru« dent reticence ; but we see also their chastisements, and wit- ness their poignant repentance. Thus we have a fearful and salutary demonstration of sin. Stem severities were neces- sary to arouse the stifled moral sense. Let imagination picture the rude infancy of a fallen race, left to the wild im- pulse of instincts, and we shall better understand the terrible rod by which it was curbed under the hand of the Divine educator. The Old Testament is not the idyl of innocence : it is the desperate conflict between good and evil in their first collision. Something was still wanting to the work of preparation ; this was the total ruin of all the glories of the theocracy, so that it might be well demonstrated that the Old Tes- tament ** could make nothing perfect," according to the expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews.* This decline was coincident with an extraordinary fermen- tation of men's minds. Thus was prepared one of the most amazing eras of history, characterised by the singular blend- ing of the most opposite tendencies. It is important for us to form an exact idea of it, that we may rightly comprehend the condition in which Christianity took its rise.f * Hebrews vii. 9. t It is not my province in this short sketch to touch any of the critical questions raised upon the books of the Old Testament. I can only refer my readers to special works, among the first of which I should mention Bleek*8 introduction on the transformations of the people during the exile. See also Ewald, " Gesch. Volkes Israel," iv., p. Z17; this is a broad and admirable picture. 60 BOOK PUtST« CHAPTER IIL THE JUDAISM OF THE DECLINE. JUDAISM at the commencement of our era presented more points of resistance than of contact to Jesus Christ, because He came, in fact, to contradict and oppose all the beliefs and wishes of His contemporaries. ^Thus, the new religion, so far from being simply the consummation oi an anterior development, only fulfilled the past by abolishing it. None the less do we maintain that it was the response to all the best aspirations of the soul, and that the true people of God, those who listened to its claims, in a manner outran the future, borne onward by an ardent and exalted faith. We shall have to distinguish this double current oi men's minds in the troubled flood of an epoch of unparal- leled moment.* The moral and intellectual condition of Judaism, on the eve of the birth of Christ, can only be understood by a knowledge of the complex causes by which it was produced. Of these causes the most powerful was undoubtedly the nation's exile in Babylon, and the political and religious situation which resulted from it. This situation gave rise to one of those violent contradictions which prevent a nation from falling into a state of slumberous repose. It may be * See the following works : Josephus* " Antiquities/* and his '* Wars of the Jews;" •* Histoire des Juifs," by Prideaux; "La Palestine,'* by Munck ; Ewald's •• Gesch. Volkes Israel," vol. iv. ; " La Kabbale," by Franck ; Reuss* " Histoire de la Th^ologie Chr^tienne," vol. i. ; Nicolas' ** Les Doctrines Religieuses des Juifs pendant lesdeux siiclee ant^eui8 a r^re Chr^tienne;" Gfroerer's **Da8 Jahrhundert des Heils," vol. ii. See especially the Apocrypha of the Old Testament ; Fabricius* ** Codex Pseudepigraphus Vet. Testamenti; " " Das Buch Enoch," uebersetxtuad erklart v. Dillemann, Leipzig, 1853; " Das Buch Esdras," uebersetxt und erklart v. Volkmar, Zurich, 1864. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 6z summed up in two words : dependence on and hatred of the foreigner. Judaea from the time of the first destruction of Jerusalem had only brief periods of real emancipation ; she was absorbed in the great empires which by turns domi* nated Asia. It was under the yoke that this powerful race rose morally to the consciousness of her high destiny ; in the times of her kings she was always inclined to culpable alliances and impure idolatries. From the bitter days of her captivity it was so no longer. By the waters of exile, the Jew, far from his beloved Zion, of which there remained only the smoking ashes, found another holy city, not built with stones, but with divine words, and the indestructible sanctuary of which was the law given to his fathers. Hav- ing lost the material, he reconquered the spiritual patrimony by his re-established faith ; he felt that the worship of the true God was the very essence of his nationality. Thus, when he returned to the land of his ancestors, as he was never able completely to reconquer it, and had the constant grief of feeling himself still subject to a foreign sway, he continued to bind in close connection his religion and his patriotism ; he knew that, his God once abjured, he was nothing more than a vile slave, like those human herds which the conquerors of Asia dragged in their train oi trampled under foot. To this feeling may be traced that noble religious restoration undertaken by Ezra, and com- pleted by Nehemiah ; the people shrank from no sacrifice, and broke without hesitation the family ties formed during the period of disorganisation and exile. Henceforward the Jew was invariably attached to his faith and his rites ; the theocracy flourished again on the ruins of a political glory for ever overthrown. It is no more under the image of a mighty king, a new Solomon, that the people represents Messiah ; it sees in Him rather a supreme high priest, as He appears in the oracles of the prophet Zechariah.* The reign * Zechariah iii. 62 BOOK PISST. of the saints has begun ; for legal sanctity is the sole aupe* riority and the sole liberty that can be preserved. Assuredly this moral reconstruction is a great advance upon the past, but it conceals one fatal germ. Piety being confounded with patriotism, the mass of the people will be disposed to regard it rather as a means of maintaining pre- eminence over other nations, than as an end excellent in Itself. Holiness will then be but external legalism, a con- formity to the sacred letter without effect on the heart and conscience ; then, the law, far from fulfilling its main design, which is to •break the pride 4>f man by placing before him a perfect ideal, will only nourish and strengthen it. Here was the peril, the gravity of which the future was to show. The close alliance between patriotism and religion tended also to excite, beyond all bounds, political passions and natural pride. The Jew felt himself at once the favourite of heaven and the sport of pagan despotism ; he knew himself superior to the nations, whose idolatry justly appeared to him abominable, and he was yet compelled to submit to the rule of those whom he despised. How great was his temptation to hold himself erect before masters — his inferiors — and to requite them scorn for all the outrages he received at their hands 1 He, the founder of true religion in the world, was forced to bow beneath an idolatrous sceptre I Could such a thought be entertained, and not stir in his heart a wild ferment of revolt and hate, and precipitate him into violent attempts, even more perilous to his religious life than to his temporal interests ? Evi* dently the hope of the nation will undergo a great transfor- mation under such influences ; it will become impregnated in this heated atmosphere with wholly human passions ; it will tend to become itself a firebrand of political agitation ; the horizon of the future, illumined by the great prophets with calm and holy glories, will be coloured with the warm and burning tints of apocalyptic visions. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 63 The complete cessation of prophecy, a short time aftei the return from the exile, contributed much tp the religious decay of Judaism. *' After the death of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the last of the prophets/' we read in the Talmud, " the Spirit disappeared from the midst of Israel." * When once this vast organisation, with its minuteness of ritual, ceased to be constantly vivified by the breath of prophecy often passing over it, like a divine whirlwind to shake its entire fabric, its tendency was to petrify into immobility. The past was no longer looked upon as pre- figuring the future by its magnificent symbols. It was made itself the object of a servile attachment ; it was pre- served as a dead institution, and the Jew, making himself its jealous guardian, inaugurated the reign of the '* letter which killeth." Tradition became increasingly predomi- nant. The doctor of the law took the place of prophet ; the rabbi became, par excellence^ the guide of the people. There was a manifest tendency to substitute knowledge for feeling in the order of religion. Hence that apotheosis of wisdom which appears in the earliest apocryphal writings of the Old Testament From these icy heights blows a withering wind, which blasts the life of the soul, and takes the beauty and the grandeur from revelation ; what is most touching in it disappears under the commentary. The dispersion of a large number of Jews in Asia Minor, Egypt, and the West, as commercial relations multiplied, strengthened the influence of the rabbu Far from their sanctuaiy, unable to offer to God the Levitical worship, the Jews who lived in foreign lands had no other means of pre- serving their religion than the study of their law. The sacred Book was to them what the tabernacle had been to their fathers in the wilderness and during the period of the conquest, before the altar of God had a splendid temple for its shelter. To read the law, to comment upon it, to fix its ' AUatns est Spititus sanctut ex Israele." — Qfroerer, i., p. 135. • <• 64 BOOK FIRST. meaning, to keep the tradition of the elders, this was all that they could do in the far countries where they dwelt. They relumed, no doubt, at certain intervals to the holy city, but the ordinary course of their life was spent at a distance from it ; they were no longer under the constant action of that great religious symbolism which expressed 80 forcibly the need of purification and redemption. Sacri- fice played but a small part in their life ; religion, habitually despoiled of those solemn ceremonies which set forth its positive character, dwindled little by little to a doctrine, an idea, a book. The temple lost in importance as the syna- gogue gained. There was in all this a revolution, the import of which was beyond calculation. The Jew of the olden time was wont to fall with ease to a point lower than that of the Jew at this period ; he became ensnared by idolatry and its unholy rites ; but when he repented at the stern voice of the prophet, or under the strokes of Divine justice, he returned to a deepened piety ; he felt an earnest need of cleansing, of expiation, and the blood of bulls and of goats was not enough to give him peace. From the time of the restoration under Ezra the Jew leads a life habit- ually more pure and more correct, but also he eludes more lightly the trouble of conscience. For the sacrifice which expresses the consciousness of sin and the hope of pardon he rather substitutes almsgiving; that is the fair outside work by which he aims to set himself right with the Divine ^ law. In the book of Tobit we see what paramount import- ance is attached to this kind of reparation. It is not only the left hand knowing what the right hand does ; it is the heart which applauds itself, and imagines that it has fulfilled all righteousness. Contact with foreigners had also a modifying effect upon Judaism in many respects. Sometimes the Jew would im- bibe an admixture of altogether heterogeneous ideas ; some- times he would abandon himself to loose concessions ; or PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 65 again, he would hold himself erect in his patriotism, and stiffen into a rigid devotion and an obstinate resistence to all influences from without. We have thus very early the gexms of the sharp division, which we shall find later pro- ducing themselves and forming sects and parties. Within a very short time after the restoration we find ourselves already confronted with the elements which will clash or combine in the great final crisis. I. Judaism under the Persians. The Persian empire, which extends from the year 536 to the year 332 B.C., exercised less influence over the Jews than is often supposed. The religion of Zoroaster, at least before the modifications to which it has been subjected, is coloured, as we have already seen, by dualism. The idea of a God greater than Ormuz and Ahriman makes only a tardy appearance, and remains but as a metaphysical idea without any real influence on the moral life. The world of spirit is only dimly discerned ; spiritual light is confounded with the brightness of the sun, good with fruitfulness. The good rule of Ormuz is honoured alike in good actions and in abundant harvests.* Sin is constantly regarded as a simple corporeal defilement. The expectation of a deliverer is very vague ; it is only little by little that the part of Sosioek, the valiant champion of Ormuz, develops into magnitude. The article of the resurrection of the body does not seem to belong to primitive mazdeism.f The Persians regarded corpses as the property of evil spirits ; they therefore ex- posed them in desert places to be devoured by wild beasts. This custom is little compatible with the idea of the resurrec- tion. Cyrus the First had a great sepulchre built for him- * The principal work on mazdeism is the commeotaiy of Eugftn Bumouf on the Ya9na. f The fragments of Theopompus, quoted by M. Nicolas (*' Doctrine des Juifs "), are vei y vague. In any case they belong to a time subsequent to the exile in Babylon. bb BOOK FIR8T« self. It is certain that maxdeism underwent great changes; the traces of Jewish and Christian influence are evident in the Bundcheshj its last sacred book. The passages of Theo- pompus, quoted by Plutarch, in which mention is made of the triumph of the good over the evil god, after a formidable conflicti belongs to a late period. No one will deny that the idea of the Messiah has taken a much more defhiite form amongst the Jews than amongst the Persians at the epoch when the two nations were brought into contact at Babylon. It would be idle to compare some vague allusions with the oracles of the Old Testament. On one point only the Jews borrowed something from their conquerors ; this was in reference to the doctrine of good and evil angels. Not that this was a strange idea to them; we need no other proofs to the contrary than the account of the Fall, in Genesis, and the prologue to the Book of Job : the Book of Tobit, however, recalls in many points the minute classification of good and evil spirits in the <cv iotas tUTaj^ai¥*.vca (vii. 27 — 30). PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 8z the necessary laws which preside over the formation and organisation of the world. The two systems are thus in manifest contradiction on all the essential points of religious doctrine, whether relating to the origin of things, to the principle of evil, or the salvation of mankind. Between Oriental dualism and Jewish or Christian theism, the oppo* sition is radical. Now Philo only revived this old dualism, enveloping it with ingenious allegories as with a veil ; it is e^sy to recognise it under the sincere homage which he pays lavishly to the religion of his fathers. His god, let him say what he will, is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who reveals Himself to His worshippers, and guides and protects them whilef He claims their obe- dience and their love ; he is an abstract being, raised above unity itself; he is placed above the good and the true, and all the categories of thought.* He did not produce the world from nothing by a free act of creation ; he can never cease to produce any more than the fire can cease to bum, or the snow to chill.f Light and life emanate from him like the beam from the star. Matter cannot be an emanation from him; thus it represents the element of diversity, disorder, passivity, which is in direct opposition to absolute being. It exists, then, eternally in his pre- sence, and has, like himself, neither beginning nor end ; he educes from it a perfect world by a process of organisation. As God cannot come in direct contact with matter, he uses as a media the ideas or powers which emanate from him, and which are the types of all the realities contained in the world ; these are the divine seals which, impressed upon formless matter, give to it form and beauty, and bring out of it the cosmos4 These ideas, these powers, are • 'O Bebs fiAnt icrl h, Tiratcrai xard t6 h xal -H^f /lOPdZa ("Leg. Alleg.** it. x). Td dv d koI dyaSoD KpeTrroep i'fy' (" De Sacr." 13). * 0^9h dy h-cpop rby pwjrbp cti^at KStrfiop 1^ $€oO \6yow KoaftowowC^rm (** De Mundi Opific." vi.). The heavenly place is full of incorporeal words (vXi/jm Affcafi&Tuif iarl \6yw) ** De Somn.** i. 21. These incorporeal words are-the angels who personify ideas. The one and personal Word, then, has no existence. See, on the impossibility of assimilating the Word of Philo to that of St. John, the noble remarks of M. Domer» in his introduction to his great book en the ** Histozy of the Doctrine and Person of Jesus Christ,'* pp. 27 — 58. t '* Man is a compound being, with a mortal and an immortal nature; he was not created directly by God, but formed into what he is by Divine 4)o\ver." (" De Pramiis et Pcenis.") X 01 /ikp 7^, 01 di oCpavoO (•* De Gigant." xiii.) PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 83 following in his track, these privileged ones may, by ecstasy and contemplation, raise themselves to the ineffable God, or rather lose themselves in Him. Like the cicada which feeds on the dew of heaven, their soul is nourished by truth and adoration.* By many artifices of interpretation does Philo essay to bring within his system the sacred books of his people ; now he has recourse to the symbolism of numbers, now he plays on names; he treats historical realities like clay which he may mould at his pleasure; following the example of his god, he impresses the stamp of his ideas on formless matter. The history of Israel becomes a pure fable of the cosmogony. Institutions are not less changed than facts and texts. Thus the priesthood, that dominant institution of the Mosaic dispensation, designed to express the need of pardon and expiation, is reduced by Philo to a cosmical symbolism. The high priest represents the whole of crea- tion. His pontifical vestments correspond to the various parts of the world.f He is priest and mediator, just as the word is, by S3niibolising the world of ideas and forces, which is the true medium between the supreme God and matter, for it alone frees the latter from its primal state of confu* sion. The priest is not needed to appease the offended Deity, but simply to deliver man from his ignorance by revealing to him his relation to God, and his place in the order of the universe. There is here no ontological mystery, the knowledge of which is salvation ; all that is required is that man should be brought to know his true condition, and to realise it by means of asceticism. Sacri- fice then becomes a mere unimportant rite. Philo declares that the purified soul of the wise is the true ahar of Deity. J If he escapes the exclusiveness of his compatriots, if he admits that Judaism is a universal religion, he does so, not taking his stand like the prophets on the accomplishment • *• Lc?. Alleg." iii. 14. t " De Victimis offcrcndU." + " De Monarch! A," Lib. ii. 84 BOOK FIRST. of the vast designs of Divine mercy, but in the name of his system of philosophy, which makes the old world only the eternal manifestation of ideas. According to him, no new act is necessary to remove the barriers between God and man, or between man and man. There is no place for reconciliation in a system which embraces all in the immu- table plan of a creation which has had no beginning in time. Every time the Jewish high priest goes up to the altar he sacrifices for the whole world ; for what he does is only to symbolise that which has always existed. Of what avail is a Messiah in such a system ? What is there to save or to heal ? If Philo speaks of the future develop- ments of Judaism under a glorious king, he only gives utterance to a vague memory of the prophets.* That which is the essential feature in the Old Testament is a mere accessory in his doctrine. Salvation, with him, reduces itself to a knowledge of the eternal order of things, and a realisation of the same by contemplation and asceti- cism. Each man is the true Messiah and Saviour for himself; Moses is only so highly exalted by Philo because he sees in him the type of the perfect ascetic. A judgment may now be formed of the assertion so lightly thrown out, that Philo is the elder brother of Jesus, and the inspirer of St. John. For my part, I know no con- tradictions in the history of human thought more flagrant than those which exist between the doctrines of these two. The first rests wholly upon the negation of moral evil ; the starting-point of the second is the deep and bitter conscious- ness of sin. Alexandrine theosophy admits no redemption ; the Gospel is nothing without this article. Philo proclaims the impossibility of Deity uniting Himself directly with the human creature, while the incarnation is the grand theme * '* There shall arise a man according to the word of God, who, being chief of his army, an d making war, shall establish his dominion over preat and populous nations. God will send succour to the saints.** (•• De Praemiis ct Pcenis.") PRELI&flf^ARY QUESTIONS. 85 of St. John. The one sees in the Word only the abstract generalisation of divine ideas; the other adores in Him the "only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father." Philo's ultimatum is this : Deity cannot touch that which is material. The fourth Gospel is summed up in this expres- sion of its prologue : '* The Word became flesh " The antithe- sis is absolute ; for that which is with St. John a capital truth, would be to the Jew of Alexandria appalling blasphemy. If, then, Christianity, must, at all costs, be linked with an ante- cedent system, this precursor must be sought elsewhere than in the synagogues of Egypt. The outgrowth of these was the sect of the Therapeutics, of which Philo draws a poetic picture; he has nothing but eulogy for that contemplative asceticism which reminds us of the wildest excesses of India. Between his system and the Gospel there is the same difference as between those silent and attenuated recluses and the first Christians — ^those conquerors of the world by their mission and martyrdom. Flourishing Jewish colonies had been founded at this epoch in Asia Minor, in Babylon, in Greece, and the islands of the Mediterranean. They were bound to the mother country by closer ties than the Egyptian Jews, who formed as it were a nation by themselves. They annually sent their offerings to the Temple, and had their representatives at the great festivals. Nothing could be more simple than the democratic organisation of the synagogues, governed by a council of elders which elected its president ; nothing less elaborate than its worship, which consisted of readings and explanations of the sacred books on the Sabbath-day. Thus the true religion was maintained in the land of strangers. The Jews of the dispersion coiUd not, however, be uninflu- enced by the intellectual atmosphere of their times. The HeHenistswert less narrow in spirit than the dwellers in Pales- tine, although a large number of them were little disposed to abandon their national privileges, as is proved by the resolute 86 BOOK PtltST. hostilities which St. Paul encountered in foreign synagogues. Each synagogue was a centre of proselytism, and made numerous converts from the pagan world. "Our laws/* said PhilOy << attract all to themselves, — barbarians, stran- gers, Greeks, the dwellers on continents and in islands, in the east, in the west, and in Europe." * The proselj^ea were divided into proselytes of the Gate^ or of the first degree, subject to what were called the precepts of Noah, which extended only to the proscription of all idolatrous practices ; and proselytes of righteousness, those who deci- dedly incorporated themselves with the people of God. V. Sects and Parties in Judsea. The sect of the Essenes forms the link between the Judaism of Palestine and that of Alexandria. It was formed under the influence of Oriental dualism, which hovered in the atmosphere as well of Asia as of Egypt. The transcendent mysticism which took form later in the Kahhala existed then as an influence. The Talmud makes plain allusiona to it, and its fundamental beliefs were unquestionably very widely spread. The theory of emanations was one of the great intellectual currents of the age. The idea of a hidden and mysterious Deity revealing Himself by His attributes, purely ideal hypostases forming in their combination the prototype of the world and, above all, of man ; the assimila- tion of evil to matter, exegesis reduced to allegorism, and morals to asceticism, — such are traits common to all the developments of Oriental theosophy. t It is not suprising to find them in Judaea under a form less philosophical than in Egypt, and rather in the state of vague aspiration than w:th the rigour of a system properly so called. ** Death is the kiss of God," we read in the Kabbala, This melancholy • " Vita Moysis, ' Lib. li. f Sec M. Franck*8 work on the Kabbala, and M. Rensa' article in Herzog*! **£ncyclofedia.*' PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 87 istterance, which ao well expressed the inconsolable sadness of the finite creature aspiring to lose itself in the infinite, may date, perhaps, from these troubled times. It is evident to us that Bssenism was the product of the dualistic tendency. The representation given of it by Philo and Josephus shows it to us, as not only in quest of a purer morality, but also as devoted to practices which savour of Pythagorism.* It is, indeed, a plant springing in the soil of Judsea, but it unfolds under the same breath which in so many different soils developed an ascetic mysticism. The Essenesy retiring to the solitudes of the Dead Sea, broke with the national religion ; these men of the desert condemned it by their eagerness to place themselves beyond its official enclosure ; they thus declared it to be at least insufficient. By suppressing sacrifices of blood, by forbid- ding to cross the threshold of the Temple, they formed in reality a new religion, over which presided elders who had no bond with the priesthood. They had established a severe initiation of three degrees, and had been eager to abolish all distinction of rank, so as to efface the faintest trace of slavery. Unhappily they had at the outset ren- dered sterile all their reforms, by isolating themselves from their people. The equality of a monastery will never bear application to common life. This was not all. Not content with having instituted a community of possessions, they condemned marriage in itself, t They showed clearly that they regarded matter as the source of evil, by the extraordinary precautions which they took to cleanse themselves from all corporeal defile- ment. Clothed in white, they offered their prayer to the sun with the first rays of dawn ; J they saw, doubtless, in the pure light of the morning the symbol of Deity. The . \ ?^.?^*^*''» treatise, "De VitoContemplativa:" and Josephus. "BelL Judaic.*' II. 8. t Tdnov flip ivtpoifUi xo/J lOroOt (Josephus, " Bell. Jud.»' ii. S. a). } E/f o^ir €txdt (Josephus, " Bell. Jud." ii. 8, 5). 88 BOOK FIRST. Essenes only acknowledged the Pontateuch, and rejected all the prophetic developments of the old covenant. What harmony could exist between Christianity and this dualistic sect, which cut itself off, in fact, from the religious tradi- tion of the Old Testament, and, following the example of the school of Philo, left to man the charge of working out his own salvation by asceticism ? More a stranger than any other portion of the Jewish people to the expectation of Messiah, it deluded the high aspirations of the soul by conventual practices ; the desert was not to it the school of sanctity designed to gird the spirit for heroic conflicts, but the refuge to which it fled to escape from the strife.* Thus, notwithstanding some wholly external analogies, it remained without any relations with the new religion. Hence the silence of our Gospels with reference to Essenism, which was weaving its solitary dream while, at Jerusalem, the destinies of the whole world were at issue.f It requires some audacity to maintain that Sadduceeism prepared the way for Christianity by enlarging the mind.t A singular method, truly, of preparation for the religion of self-renunciation, was that of perverting souls, and sapping in the conscience the basis upon which alone it could be founded. The Sadducees found in Herod a king after their own heart, a stranger to any true scruples, the parasite of the foreigner, the sworn enemy of the fervid devotion which gives birth to agitation and opposition, a sacrilegist never hesitating to elevate his creatures to the priesthood. Such a rule was well suited to those men of pleasure, who desired only the material advantages of power. Josephus shows at its just value the pretended breadth of spirit of the Sad- * We are unable to subscribe to Ewald's opinions (Gesch. Israel, fv., p. 476), and to those of M. Reuss (" Histoire de la Literature au Siecle Apostolique," i., p. X15), as to the purely Hebraic origin of Essenism. f We have refuted, by these observations, Strauss* idea of the conn?c« tion between primitive Christianity and Essenism. '* Leb. Jesu fur das deutsche VoUc," p. 175). t " Leb. Jesu fur das deutsche Volk,** p. 178. PRELnUNA&Y QUBSTIONS. ducees, when he complains of their haughty and almost savage arrogance. None has a narrower and harder heait than the voluptuous egotist, who looks at humanity only vnth a view to the advantage he may extract from it. The Sadducees religiously followed the maxim of their founder, Zadok — ** Sever not thyself from the majority." Not thus are religious heroes tempered. The Pharisees, although excluded by Herod from high offices, exercise nevertheless a paramount influence. They are the direct inheritors of that severe and exalted Judaism by which religion was restored on the return from the exile, only calculation has succeeded to fervour, and dry and scenic devotion to sincere piety; holiness is no longer anything but a means to success — ^it becomes hypocrisy by its display; it is no longer the life of the soul, but spends itself in vestments, gestures, and attitudes. It founds a school, and becomes the watchword of a religious coterie. No doubt, some upright, though mistaken souls there are among the Pharisees, but, taken as a whole, their party is given up to the letter, to forms and ceremonies ; it confounds interests and beliefs, and pursues earthly ends by religious means^ which is the worst of all profanations. Its greatness is in its inflexible patriotism, which may lead it even to heroism, and which, meanwhile, assures to it a moral authority over a people whose idol it is, because it shares their passions. If we would know the opinions which prevailed in Judaea at this period, it is to the Pharisees we must look for the answer. VI. The movement of thought in Palestine before the birth of Jesus Christ.* * Our first source of knowledge is, of course, the New Testament ; then Josephus, who is so rich in information as to the doctrine of his contemporaries. The Talmud may be used, but cautiously. We find in it a complete collection of Pharisaic tradition, under its two forms, the Mishna and the Getnara, It may be inferred, from allusions and quotations by several of the Fathers, among others by Origen ('* De Principiis," Delarue edition, vol. i., p. 179), that an important part ot go BOOK FIRST. We have seen how, from the time of the religious re* storation under Ezra, and the extinction of the spirit of prophecy, the doctor or rabbi became the foremost personage of the Judaism of the decline. A complete summary of his doctrine is given in the famous precept — **Set a hedge about the laWf and make many disciples" * In other words, pre- serve the national institutions by a rigorous tradition, and teach this tradition in numerous schools. ''Tradition is the check of the law,*' say the rabbis again, f Nothing could be better adapted than such a maxim to exalt their own importance. This revolution is completely achieved in the time of Herod. The doctor boldly claims his place on the highest seat of the hierarchy, and above the prophet.^ The Targums do not scruple to apply to him the glorious promises of the Old Testament. Onkelos renders in the following terms the famous prophecy of Jacob about Shi- loh : " Neither the prince nor the scribe shall depart from Judah till the coming age.*' If Joseph is the favourite of his father, it is because he is a doctor. If men are com- manded to stand before the hoary head, it is because this indicates a man versed in the study of the law. § The rabbi declares loudly that he wears a crown ; he calls himself a king. "There are three crowns," said Rabbi Simeon; "the the Mishna was in existence before the end of the third centuxy: we find in the Mishna an evident allusion to Adrian*s war of extermination against the Jews. Whenever we find a precept which is a development of the Pharisaic doctrines, such as they are represented to us m the , pii., c. Ixviii;. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. lOI This fundamental idea is invested with strange symbols in that curious book of Enoch, the first outline of which may be traced up to the time of the Maccabees, but which was enriched and modified in the succeeding period.* The intention of the unknown author was evidently to counter- act the Sadducean tendency; he wished to combat that sort of Jewish epicurism which removed God to the great- est possible distance from the world, and set aside His intervention alik^ in nature and in history. Desirous of filling the universe with the Divine activity, he gives us a sort of fantastic theory of physics, which admits no natural causes, but multiplies everywhere the direct agents of Deity, and peoples space with myriads of angels, charged * " Das Buch Enoch ubersetzt and erklart/' von Dillmann, Leipzig, 1853. The Greek fragments, published by Syncellus, have been col- lected in the second volume of the '* Codex Pseudepigraphus Vet. Tes- tament! " of Fabricius. It is difficult to fix the date of the book of Enoch with certainty. The chronological data taken from the calcula- tion of weeks in the ninety-third chapter, are always open to the charge of arbitrariness, as there is no fixed element for the valuation of the symbolic numbers. Ewald and Dillmann see in chapter xc. a clear allusion to Johannes Hyrcanus, who is the valiant lamb with the terrible and victorious horn. But it is quite possible that, after the manner of the prophets, Johannes Hyrcanus was cited after his death as a type of the future deliverer, rather than as himself the Messiah. The son of Maccabeus would play in such an apocalypse the part of David in ancient prophecy. That the book was extant before Christ is evi- denced by the quotation in Jude (ver. 14). Some features appear to point to the time of the Herods ; the most significant seems to me that in chap. Ivi. : *' In those days the angels shall be gathered together, and their chiefs shall turn towards the east, towards the Parthians and the Medes, to excite a movement among the kings of those countries." These nations are to be stirred up to invade Judaea. Now, the invasion of the Parthians actually took place thirty-seven years before Christ. They drove away the high priest Hyrcanus, with his protectors, Herod the Great and his brother. (Gfrcerer i., p. 100. LiJcke ** Oflfenbar. Johann. i., 251.) We are therefore much disposed to place the book of Enoch in the very century of Jesus Christ. It appears to us evident that chapter Ixiii. has been altered into the Christian sense. The Mes- siah in the original was represented as pre-existing in the thought of God, according to the doctrine of absolute predestination. Thence, to attribute to Him, by a few additions which were supposed to be merely explanations, actual pre-existence was but a step. We have, beside, clear proof of an after-touch in chapter xc. To the description of the white bull, as an image of the Messiah, is added — '* He was the Word.** (See Dillman, p. 65.) 102 BOOK FIRST. with the various functions of nature. Enoch, the g^at saint of the patriarchal age, is chosen to become the re- vealer of these mysteries of the world ; translated in a remote age into the clouds, he is able to traverse the ob- scure regions veiled from our eyes by visible appearances* The author teaches not only the doctrine of angels, but also that of demons; these are the spirits of the giants sprung from the uiiion of fallen angels with the daughters of men. The revelations vouchsafed to Enoch, whether in his peregrinations through space or in his visions, bear principally on God's plan with regard to man. History is only the unfolding of His eternal designs ; all that has be- come apparent in the course of time existed before the ages in His thought. This ideal pre-existence is naturally attri- buted first of all to Messiah, who is to be His great repre- sentative upon earth. He is to be bom in the bosom of the Jewish people, that chosen object of Divine favour. He is called the. Son of man, and righteousness dwells with Him. ** He shall awake from their sleep the kings and the strong ones of the earth, and overturn the mighty from their seats : he shall break the teeth of the wicked. He shall expel kings from their kingdoms, because they have not hearkened to and honoured him. He shall fill the strong with confusion ; darkness shall be their dwelling, and worms their resting-place. They shall be driven from the habitations of his people. Then shall the prayer ot the just, and the cry of their blood, mount up to heaven."* Messiah is not only to preside at the last judgment, he is also to raise the dead. In those days earth and hell shall yield up that which has been committed to them. The Son of man will gather around him the just, the saints; for the day of their salvation will be come. The mountains shall skip like little rams, and the hills like lambs that have been satisfied with milk. <* Neither gold nor iron shall save the * Book of Enoch, xlvi. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. IO5 wicked in presence of the Great Elect of God : they shall melt before him like honey before the fire. He will be seated upon the throne of justice; he will judge all the acts of the saints which are in heaven, and weigh them in his balances. The kings and the mighty ones will own him, seated upon the throne in glory; they will know that it is no more possible to utter before him vain words. Then griel will come upon them, as travail upon the woman with child. They will look one upon another, and be in fear, when they see this son of a woman upon the throne of glory. The angels of justice will seize them to punish them for having evil-entreated the children of God and His elect, and they will be a spectacle to the righteous. They will cry : * O that Thou wouldst give us rest, that we might - praise and magnify the King of kings 1 We sigh for rest, and we find none ; our light has gone out, and darkness is our eternal habitation, because we have not believed in him, but have put our hope in the sceptre of our royalty and in our glory.' "* In contrast with this terrible punish- ment of the great ones of the heathen, Enoch describes the bliss of the elect, in whom we recognise the children of Israel ; he shows them to us seated at the feast of God, clothed in bright raiment, and tasting pleasures that know no end. The same ideas reappear under other figures in the famous ninetieth chapter, which closes the symbolical sketch of the history of the holy nation. Israel is likened to a flock of sheep, led successively by seventy shepherds, who represent the foreign kings counted from the exile. The pagan nations which trampled on God's elect are compared to ravens and eagles. These birds of prey wound and blind the unhappy flock, till the day when a few of the young and valiant sheep separate from the rest, and victoriously fight against their oppressors. Here is an * Book of Enoch, Ixii. I04 BOOK FIRST. evident allusion to the Maccabees, who are represented as the forerunners of Messiah. One of these courageous sheep has a great horn, which the birds of prey endeavour but vainly to break. The reign of Messiah commences, but it is not fully described, because the author has pre- viously sufficiently expanded this part of his subject : this reign is designated the era of the sword. The fallen angels undergo their punishment ; each sheep receives a sword, and kills the ravenous creature. As soon as the judgment begins, the Son of man writes down the names of the sheep, ^ind opens before God the book of life. What other than Messiah could on such a day enact 80 important a part ? * The fallen angels, symbolised by stars, are the first to be thrown into the place of condemna- tion ; then the seventy shepherds were put to death, and plunged into flaming deeps. The. unfaithful sheep share the same fate. A new temple rises on the ruins of the old; it is infinitely richer and more splendid. The elect sheep there fix their abode, and receive the homage of all the other animals ; they are whiter than snow, and their eyes are opened. The sword which had been given them has become useless; they lay it down in the sanctuaxy. Messiah reappears, in this glorious era, under the form of a white bull with large black horns. The meaning of these distorted symbols is plain ; they represent the triumph of the Jewish theocracy, at the close of a terrible conflict in- augurated by Messiah; his reign is to be preeminently * M. Colani will not recognise the Messiah in this portion of the book of Enoch, the only one which appears to him positively Jewish. (** J^sus Christ et les Croyances Messianiques." Introduction, p. 22.) He takes his stand on the evider.t retouchings of the similitudes; but these re- touchings are not sufficient to take away all their value. He maintains that the date of these similitudes is clearly indicated by the allusion to the thermal baths, placed in volcanic spots, and where the great of the earth give themselves up to all voluptuousness; but the chapter to which this passage belongs is part of a fragment subsequently interpolated, '^ich contains the revelation of Noi.h on the deluge. (Dillmann, PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. I05 that of the sword. Certainly, the Jewish dream never found a more hrilliant and passionate expression than this. The fourth book of Esdras belongs to a later period ; it dates from the troublous times between the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, and the sanguinary repression of the revolt of Bar-Cocheba.* But it may be considered as an authentic product of the synagogue, as the faithful expression of the Pharisaic spirit in its invariable type. Esdras is the scribe, par excellence; he has drunk the fiery cup of inspi- ration,t and is the chosen organ of rabbinism. The Pharisee endeavours to raise his Messiah to the height of the Christ of the Gospels, and to this end he borrows, as did in later times the paganism of the decline, from the religion which he anathematises. But it is in vain; his Messiah remains * The fourth book of Esdras is to be found in the second volume of the *' Codex Pseudepigraphus '* of Fabricius. (See especially the ex- planatory edition of M. Volkmar — Zurich, 1863.) The author has very ingeniously endeavoured to fi < the date of the book, by means of the famous vision of the eagle (c. xi. and xii.)t which, as always, is tr.e type of the Roman power. The symbolical eagle has twice six wings, three heads, then three under-wings. By former critics twelve wings were counted ; that is to say, twelve Roman emperors, taking literally the words twice six wings ; and there was the utmost difficulty in not plac- ing the fourth book of Esdras sufficiently far on in the second century. M. Volkmar has reduced these twice six wings to six pairs of wings, each pair representing an emperor. We have then only six emperors. He places his reason for this reduction in the connection between the 26th and 27th verses of chapter xi. In verse 26 the first wing is spoken of in these words — -prima encta est ; while the second is thus described, et secunda velocius quam priores non comparuerunt This plural explica- tive of the singular of verse 26 shows that two wings were equivalent to a single pair of wings, which represents a single emperor. This gives U8 the six emperors of the Julian family, of whom the last was Nero. The three under-wings are the three usurpers — Otho, Galba, and Vitellius. The three heads are the three emperors, Vespasian, Titus, and Commodus. We are thus brought back to the commencement of the second century for the composition of the book. The two first chapters are an interpolation in the Christian sense. The Christology of ti-.e fourth book of Esdras was conceived under the influence of the primitive Church. M. Volkmar acknowledges this frankly. Nothing can better prove the importance which had already been acquired by the Christian metaphysics, which are said to have been invented fifty years later. t iv- 39- Zo6 BOOK FIRST. fashioned after his own likeness ; he is only the repre- sentative of the implacable pride of the Pharisee, rearing itself above the smoking walls of the temple. The mass of mankind is represented as a multitude without cause ; that is to say, without any right to be, — ^the worthless dregs of the cup of creation.* Creation only exists for the sake of the chosen people, who are the lily and the treasure of the Lord.f If this lily has been torn from its n^itive soil, and trodden under foot, it is only for a time. "When the centuries have revolved, my Son, the Messiah, shall be mani- fested with his own, and he will give four hundred years of bliss to the survivors. He will execute his first judgment on the heathen, and will be to them like a consuming fire. He will bring back the ten tribes of Israel from their dis- persion, and reunite the chosen people. After these years my Son will die, as well as ail that breathe, { and the world will relapse into its ancient silence for seven days. Then the earth will give up those who sleep in her bosom, and the Most High will sit on His throne. Righteousness, truth, and faith will alone endure. God will rejoice in the little company of His elect.§ Here, will He say, is My peculiar people, among whom My name has been called. I will not heed the great multitude of them that perish, for they will be justly condemned to hell. Zion shall throw off her weeds, and shall come forth in new beauty." The Roman power, under the figure of an eagle, is to be laid low in the dust. ** Thou hast troubled the meek, thou hast done violence to the men of peace, thou hast loved liars, thou hast overthrown the walls of those who had not wronged thee. Thy wicked- ness has risen up to the Most High, and thy pride to the * " Residuas gentes dixisti eas nil esse et salivae assimilatie sunt ** (vi. 56). f * Propter nos creatum est seculum. Populus tuus (juem vocasti unigenitum " (vi. 56, 57). '* 2x omnibus floribus eligisti tibi lilium tuum " (v. 24). !** Et morietur filius meus Christus ** (vii. 30). *' Multi creati sunt, pauci autem salvati." PRSLIMINART QUBSTIONS. IO7 mighty God. The Most High has put an end to thine haughtiness, and the measure of thy crimes is fulfilled. Therefore shalt thou no more be seen, thou eagle with the terrible wings; neither thy horrid plumes, nor thine accursed heady nor thy cruel talons, nor thy body naked and despoiled. The whole earth shall be delivered; it shall be snatched from thy violence, and shall put its hope in the justice and mercy of Him who created it." * The differences between the fourth book of Esdras and the book of Enoch are certainly many ; the most important is that in the former the resurrection and the judgment are reserved to God alone ; but the fanatic pride of the Pharisees, their insolent contempt for mankind, their thirst for vengeance, their desire of a terrible revenge on their oppressors, — all have equally left their burning mark on this strange book. It is not without beauty, but it showa in its whole depth the chasm which separates the ideal of Jesus Christ from that of the Jews of His time. The radical opposition between the two religious move- ments is further evident from their definitive result. The teaching of Christ is summed up in the Gospel, that of the rabbis in the Talmud. On the one side we have a living history which is wholly imbued with a new spirit, without fixed formulas and without ritual ; on the other, a body of confused traditions, a rubric of all the forms of piety, carried into the minutest details. Except the " Pirke Aboth,*' the book of principles, which contains what may be called the spirit of Pharisaism, the Tulmud consists of a series of treatises with reference to the hours and forms of prayer, the classification of offerings, the observance of the feasts and of the Sabbath, fasts, vows, purifications, and the practices of daily life. Besides the texts or the Mishna^ comprising a strange medley of traditionary re- gulations, we have the commentary or the Gemara, which * Ssdras zii. 42 — ^46. I08 BOOK FIRST. is only a reproduction of the various interpretations of the rabbis. The Talmud never rises to a moral principle which might give an impress of unity to the religious life ; it con- fines itself to outward manifestations which are infinite in their diversity, and endeavours by the multiplicity of re- gulation to anticipate all imaginable cases. Generalisation and unity are only possible when religion ascends to the first springs of the moral life. The Talmud, which con- templated only the " outside of the cup and the platter," loses itself in the wearisome multiplication of isolated and successive acts. It is nothing more than a puerile ritual, vindicated by a perverted exegesis; it is a stiff-jointed skeleton with no breath of life — the mummification, it might be called, of the religion of the prophets. It is of no avail to bring forward the name of Hillel, the famous rabbi, who lived a few years before Jesus Christ. His contest with Shamai dwindles to very small proportions, and yet he is one of the fathers of the Talmud. The noble maxims cited from him are encased in the charnel-house of a dry legalism. The chief and most beautiful are the following : ** Imitate the disciples of Aaron ; love peace, seek peace, love men, and attach thyself to the study of the law. Do not answer for thy virtue before the day of thy death ; do not judge thy neighbour without being able to place thyself in his position. Show thyself a man where a man is wanting. He who seeks fame loses it. He who uses his crown of knowledge as a tool soon forfeits it.*' * On close examination the spirit of caste is very evident in Hillel; he did not rise above the idea of earthly retribution. He it is who, seeing a skull floating on the water, exclaims, ''Because thou hast drowned, thou hast been drowned; and they who have drowned thee will be drowned in their turn." t He shared the rabbinical infatuation. ** He who has gained the knowledge of the law," he said, ** has pro- • " Pirke Aboth," pp. 481—491. f Ibid. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. ' ZO9 cured for himself eternal life." A religious movement must be judged by its general direction, and not by such and such an isolated manifestation. Looking at the sub- ject in this light, it would be impossible seriously to establish a parallel between the doctrine of Christ and that of the rabbis. Between the two influences rises the Cross of Calvary. There is a kinship between the two religions, but every attempt to melt them into one is foredoomed to failure. The form taken by the doctrine of good and evil angels in Jewish theology, from the time of the exile, is well known. It connected itself with some of the oldest por- tions of holy Scripture, as, for example, the account of the fall in Genesis ; it was doubtless a branch of the tree of Hebraic revelations, but its growth had become diseased under foreign influences. The book of Enoch furnishes abundant evidence of this. The reader is lost among minute classifications, overlaid with absurd inventions* Every element, every part of the earth, every nation, has its guardian angel. The book of Tobit gives such a guard- ian to each pious Israelite. As to the bad angels, they are supposed to be the spirits of giants sprung from the adulte- rous union of the sons of God with the daughters of men ; they wander over the world, "seeking rest, and finding none." According to other rabbinical traditions, more in conformity with the account in G;^nesis, demons are likened to the fallen angels who contributed to the ruin of man. Impressed and terrified by the mysterious power of evil spirits, the Jews multiplied forms of exorcism and incanta- tion. They ascribe a peculiar value to certain books attributed to Solomon. Although the popular imagination may have greatly exaggerated the instances of possession, it would be hard to deny that, in these critical times, the mysterious action of evil spirits made itself felt in an especial manner. We shall return to this diflicult subject in speaking of the miracles of Jesus. In any case, the no BOOK FIRST. solemn consciousness of a formidable conflict between the power of good and the dark and subtle world which encom* passes ourSy is a characteristic feature of this period. Pharisaic Judaism was not content with dreams of a brilliant future of glory and terrestrial happiness ; it endea- voured again and again to realise its visions. Hence the ready success of those political agitators who sought to re-enact the part of the Maccabees, and ended as common rebels. The most notable was Judas of Gamala in Galilee, of whom Gamaliel speaks in his address to the Sanhedrim.* Closely united to the Pharisaic faction , he pretended to revive theocratic piety by restoring it to entire conformity with the Pentateuch; it was an attempt at enfranchise- ment^ in harmony with the prejudices of the people, and carried out sword in hand. That which had been under- taken with the sword perished by the sword.f Such was also the fate of Theudas, also mentioned by Gamaliel, who tried to overthrow the golden eagle which Herod had placed on the gate of the temple, and who stirred up a revolt at Jerusalem which cost him his life. He was an eminent Pharisee, who had great influence in his youth ; he sought to re-establish religion in its purity, and to break the foreign yoke. I Between the fanatics who endeavoured to realise by force of arms their ardent dream of religious restoration, and the Sadducees, ready to sell their country to the stranger, there was a certain number of men of marked character who avoided both extremes, and united a moderate patriotism with great religious indiflerence ; they are perfectly repre- • Acts V. 37. t Joeephus, Ant. xviii. i — 6. I According to Josephus ('* Bel Jud." i. 332), he was called Matthias, which inay be translated by the Greek Theodas or Theudas (Gift of God). He must not be confounded with the Theudas of whom Josephus speaks (" Antiquities " xi. 5, i), whorevolted under Fadus — that is forty- four years after Christ, and after the death of Gamaliel. There is nothing to compel us to attribute to St. Luke a chronological error, quite inconceivable in him. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. Ill sented by his historian Josephus, that politic Pharisee who took part in the war of independence, but went over in time to the conqueror. He appears in the undoubted character of the citizen of an illustrious country ; he exalts his glory with complacency, but he obliterates all the religious gran- deur of Judaism, and comprehends nothing of its distinc* tive character ; in his histoxy there is no breaching after the future, and the hope of Messiah sinks into the mere ambi- tion of a people, eager for aggrandisement. Josephus cer- tainly mentions the miracles — but he has never grasped the principle of all miracle, the sovereign intervention of God in our destinies for the accomplishment of a vast design. He illustrates his narrative by prodigies like Titus Livius or Tacitus; but he does not rise above a cold, classic history. We have hitherto spoken only of official Judaism at the time of Christ, the Judaism which reigned in the schools and in the ten: pie. The pure religion of the Old Testament has also its representatives, even in this age of decline. More than one heart was waiting for the fulfilment of the ]M'omises, without mingling in its hopes any earthly passion. We shall see this little body of the moral elect of the nation (whom we shall have to seek among the humble and de- spised, or at least in the most obscure ranks of Jewish society), reaching the crowning point of the religious de- velopment of the old covenant, and gathering the ripened fruit of that long work of preparation which commenced at the fall. The sufferings and bitternesses of the time strength- ened and purified their holy aspirations. If the work of preparation resulted in the pagan world in disengaging from all religions and all philosophies one grand ideal, not to be realised by unaided human powers, has not Judaism the same issue ? But there is here more than a simple aspiration ; there is a glorious promise, the sacred legacy of the fathers. The decline of Judaism proves that it could 1X2 BOOK FIRST. not find the fulfilment of the promise within itself. All at- tempts to realise its ideal, within the enclosure of Judaism, deplorably misrepresent it. Therefore right hearts and pious, in the midst of long obscurity, are panting after a great Divine manifestation. Thus they offer to Jesus that point of contact, without which there would be no moral link between Him and the race He came to represent and snve. TRBLIMINARY QUBSTI0N8. SIJ CHAPTER IV. SOURCES OP THE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST* T3EF0RE tracing the life of Jesus Christ, it is necessary -"-^ to determine whether the sources from which we shall draw our narrative are pure or corrupted, whether what they give is history or legend. Bold critics maintain that it is more easy for us to know Socrates than Jesus, because, say they, we have not, in order to reach the Greek phi- losopher, to traverse the opaque medium of superstitions. Plato and Xenophon were • the immediate disciples of the Athenian sage; they did not make a god of him, and allowed events to appear in their true colour.* If this be so, we must abandon the hope of forming any just idea of the sources of Christianity. We believe, however, on the contrary, that Jesus Christ is better known to us than So- crates, and that His disciples, bound by a respect full of adoration for His person, have not permitted themselves the licence so largely used by Plato, of transforming the teach- ing of their Master under pretext of enriching it. They saw in Him the Son of God, and therefore were constrained to preserve intact that which He did and said. We have in this their persuasion a guarantee for their scrupulous exactness ; for what can be added to that which is believed to be divine ? All we need then to know is, whether we still possess the primitive tradition, whether what we have before us is a direct and sincere testimony. It will be easy to establish that no history, our enemies themselves being judges, rests on more irrefragable documents than the Gospel history. We ask for it but the common rights of criticism ; * Strauss, " Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Volk bearbeitet," p. 662. 8 114 BOOK FIRST. it is enough for us that it be not made the subject of ex- ceptional rules, the application of which would overthrow the best authenticated facts. To demand, before admitting the authenticity of a writing, not only direct quotations in a contemporary book, but also multiplied attestations that these quotations are neither mutilated nor invented, is to accept as history nothing but legal documents and official patents.* The "Commentaries" of Csesar and the "Annals" of Tacitus would not stand such tests; for there is no effective resource against the scepticism which is rather a diseased state of the mind than an active exercise of the reason. Inability to draw a conclusion ought to be carefully distinguished from free and conscientious inquiry. I. General proofs of the reality of the Gospel histoiy. In all history it is needful to distinguish the essential facts, the main points, which stand out at the first glance from the particular facts, the details which alone give colour and life to the narrative. There are then two distinct kinds of evidence ; first of all, a direct testimony, then one more vague and general, which is like the echo in the distance of an important event. Every great historical event naturally extends beyond the narrow circle in which it originates ; it has an influence on the world, and leaves traces of itself, more or less deeply marked. This double testimony is not wanting to primitive Christianity. Besides its adherents and apostles, who alone can make known to us its true nature, it has, from its commencement, left its trace on Jewish and pagan literature, so as to puc beyond a question the reality of its appearance. The men v/ho hated and despised it have at least guaranteed its Ciiaracter as history ; it will be well to hear their testimony before that of its authentic organs. It is certain that, from the tirst year ui the second century, * Strauss, pp. 40, 41. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 1 15 the new religion had not only grown in the land of Judaea^ which was its cradle, but had also spread in the Roman em- pire, and had acquired sufficient importance in Asia Minor to lead Pliny the Younger, proconsul of Bithynia, to refer to it in a famous letter to the emperor, in which he describes, not without uneasiness, its progress and its triumphs, and inquires of Trajan how he is to comport himself towards this strange sect, at once submissive to the civil laws and rebellious to the gods. The keen eye of the governor perceives, from the first, the close bond which attaches the sect to the person of its founder ; he discerns that the memory of Christ, or rather the adoration pledged to Him, is the very soul of the religion which bears His name.* Thus this high digni- tary of the empire, this freethinker, declares to his master that a new moral power, full of victorious energy, has arisen in the old Asiatic world, and that it owns the name of Jesus Christ. Evidently a course is needed to explain results so mighty ; it is clear that this man, whom Pliny contents him« self with naming (while admitting that to his disciples he is a God), must have acquired an incomparable ascendancy over them. Some great event must have happened half a century before, in that comer of Judaea from whence this irresistible movement sprang. It is not an exaggeration of the import of this testimony to interpret it thus. To it may be added the evidence of two other witnesses, which, while far less exact, is of great importance from its date. The first is that of Suetonius. The historian of the Caesars, while failing to distinguish the new religion from the ancient faith out of which it arose, confirms at least the fact that the name of Jesus had occasioned a ferment of agitation in the heart of Judaism.f The second testimony is drawn from the famous passage of Tacitus on the first of the persecutions. In spite of the scorn which the haughty • "Carmenque Christo quasi Deo dicere" (Pliny, Lib. x., Epist. 98). f " Juaa;os, impulsore Christo, assidue tumultuantes, Rom& expulit*' (Suetoniub, " Claudius/* 25). Xl6 BOOK FIRST. Roman lavishes on the ignoble sect, — in which he lashes that desire for novelty and that passion for strange religions which assail the ancient Roman constitution and add to the anarchy of the inglorious age, which he stigmatises as he chronicles it, — it is easy to perceive that the Christians to* wards the year 65 formed, in a vast city in which nothing Qould awake astonishment, a party numerous enough to fix attention and draw down public animadversion ; the head of this party is plainly one Christ, who was put to death under the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pilate ; ♦ from this crucified criminal the sect has taken its name — ^a fact which sufficiently reveals the strength of His authority over it. The religion of the Crucified was, then, established at Rome thirty years after the date of His suffering. Thirty years hardly suffice to explain such a progress from the remote country of its birth to the centre of civilisation. Evidently long before that date, the period of indefinite elaboration must have been completed ; it is not possible to admit that a fable in process of formation could have crossed the seas, founded a large Church in the capital of the world, and excited the wrath of Nero. We arrive at the same result if we turn to Jewish testi- mony. No one in our day maintains any longer the entire authenticity of the chapter which Josephus devotes to Christ in his ''Antiquities." If this curious passage has been evidently retouched, its essential features, which we repro- duce, remain : '' In those times appeared Jesus, a wise man, the author of extraordinary acts,t having for disciples those who love truth ; He gathered around Him many Jews and * '*Auctor nominis ejus Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procura- torem Pentium Pilatum, supplicio affectus erat" (Tacitus, " Annals," t THf yiip Topa^^wf ipywp Toirfrijt (" Antiquities** xviii. 3, 3). M. Renan admits the authenticity of this passage. Taking it apart from any positively Christian features, as we have taken it, it accords per* iectly with the Jewish historian*s point of view. He takes a pnioent position with regard to Christianity ; he confirms the facts, while admit- ting that Jesus Christ was rejected by the 4liti of the nation. The PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. II7 Greeks. They did not renounce the love they had pledged to Him, even after Pilate had condemned Him to the cross, at the demand of the chiefs of the nation. The hody of the Christians, who have called themselves by His name, have remained faithful to Him to this day." This testimony from a writer of the first century of our era, a stranger, and one as indifferent as possible to the Christian movement, has a great value. Josephus guarantees the historical character of the great events that transpired at Jerusalem, though he may misconceive their inner and divine meaning. Even the Talmud confirms in its manner the evangelical history by giving the names of three of the apostles, just those who on the most natural supposition may have had relations with the synagogue,* and by defaming the mira- culous power of Jesus Christ, as His contemporaries did.f One seems to be hearing again those Pharisees who, unable to dispute His supernatural works, ascribed them to demo- niacal influence. Jesus Christ worked miracles, and was mortally hated by the representatives of the Jewish hierarchy ; this is the evidence of the Talmud. The testimony of the indifferent, and of enemies, is thus in favour of the histori- cal verity of primitive Christianity. This twofold testimony teaches us that, on the threshold of the modern era, Judaism and paganism were profoundly agitated by a man of Galilee, who wrought marvellous works, and miserably ended His strange life upon a cross. This condemned malefactor reigns nevertheless over His sect, which increases, and has passage in which he speaks of th^ death of James, the brother of the Lord, has not been questioned, and it refers evidently to that which we have quoted (** Antiquities " xix. 9, z.) * Matthew, Thaddeus, and James are mentioned in the Talmud of Babylon (" Treatise of the Sanhedrim," f. 43, i.) f When the Rahhi Eliezer, the son of Damas, was bitten by a serpent, Jacob the son of Zechanias came to him, and spake these words : *' I will speak to thee in the name of Jesus the son of Pandera.** Then the Rabbi Israel exclaimed, "No, that is forbidden." '* It were better to die," said another," " than to hear that name " (Talmud of Jerusalem, '"Treatise Avoda Sarah," f. 46, 4: Tholuck, " Glaubwiirdigkeit der Evang. Geschichte," p. 72). 1X8 BOOK FIRST. the formidable honour of uniting against itself in one common hatred the synagogues and the pagan powers. Our hostile or contemptuous witnesses do not speak only of the advent of a new idea ; no — that which stirs a world is more than an idea, more than a doctrine ; it is a person : His name has become a standard, a symbol — more still, a moral power. Who then is this Jesus, this Christ, who is at once so worshipped and maligned ? Let us now listen to the testimony of His friends. Pagan historians have shown us the existence, from the close of the first century, of a new and powerful religious body owning the name of Jesus. This religious body we know by the testimony of its authentic representatives ; it has ex- pressed its beliefs and its sentiments in unexceptionable documents. What do we gather from all these but the memory of the Christ of the Gospels, preserved not only in narratives full of holy love, but also in the very life of the Christians ? Their souls feed on the great facts of evangelic story ; more than this, they die to attest it, and the sur- vivors inscribe its most pathetic symbols in the dark caves where they lay the remains of their martyrs ; this history is the constant subject of their teaching and of their hymns. Above all, it is written in their deepest hearts. " I have no other holy annals,'* said an unknown Christian, '< but Jesus Christ, His cross. His death, and resurrection."* Such words are the motto of the Church of the second century, which rises in a body to be the irrefragable witness of the ev> nt i of the first. That an assurance so steadfast, so general, so heroic, could have been bom of any mere legend^ is a supposition which we cannot receive. We have still more direct testimony of the same period in the evidence of Quadratus, the earliest of Christian apolo- • 'Bmo2 V d/>xaui itrrv 'Ii7 It6 BOOK FIRST. thew, with this prefix, " It is written."* The original text has been discovered in the convent of Sinai, with the famous manuscript of the New Testament. Thus, from the dust of a monkish cell, arises a witness of the first ages, to give us a pledge of the historical value of our Gospels at the most critical moment of the dispute as to their origin. Heresy itself comes forward to depose in their favour, during the course of the second century. It perverts, no doubt, the sacred text, and makes a Gospel in its own like- ness, with which it mingles its reveries and wild specula- tions ; but under its subtle webs perpetually appears the firm texture of our canonical narratives. Sometimes a whole allegorical system is based on a single point, a soli- tary detail, and the confirmation thus given to these accounts is all the more decisive for its indirectness.f The celebrated ** Clementine Homilies,*' a sort of heretical romance belonging to the first half of the second century, quote numerous passages from our four Gospels, with such precision that it is impossible to doubt for an instant that the author had them before him.J It may perhaps be • Hihrore, M9 a^oC i^€\i^To inrip wSUna^ dfULfyrlaof ii^fjuoT^^ovt {** £p'. Barn.*' i. 5). j* Matt. ix. 13. xarpUp yXinTTfy pa^ irapa^^ t6 Kor'abrbv e^77Aior (Euseb. iii. 24). § St. Jerome, '* Comment, in Matth. Prefat.'* Origen in Eusebius, vi. 25. Irenseus, '* Hseres.*' iii. z. II Luke V. 27 ; Mark ii. 14. If Matt. X. 3 ; Mark iii. z8 ; Luke vi. 15. The first Gospel (x. 3} calls Matthew 6 r€>jbinft, and mentions (ix. 9, zo) his calling of tax- gatherer, and the feast which he gave to Jesus at his house. In Luke V. 27 — 29, and Mark ii. Z3~Z5, the feast piven by the publican Levi is in the same historical connection. Evidently the reference is to the same person. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS* Z45 amount of education, which rendered him capable of relating the facts of which he was the witness* He belonged to that despised class, which the party of the Pharisees loaded with such contempt, that to be in the company of a publican was itself a scandal.* An upright and pious soul, attached to the religion of his fathers, the tax-gatherer Levi had doubt- less suffered cruelly from this species of moral proscription; he was thus prepared to appreciate keenly the contrast be* tween the implacable Judaism of the Pharisees and the religion of charity which was the fulfilment of true Judaism. The look of holy love turned upon this noble wounded heart bound it for ever to the person of Jesus. Matthew, accord- ing to the statement of Eusebius, appears to have remained at Jerusalem later than the other apostles.f It was, there- fore, natural that he should be appealed to, to give an account of their common preaching in the capital of the theocracy. We have only vague information upon his mission in Arabia, and the close of his life. Let us turn to his Gospel, and to the rare light thrown by Christian antiquity on its composition. We must pause be- fore the celebrated passage of Papias, the subject of so much controversy. Papias declares that he learned from John, the Presbjrter, the contemporary of the apostles, that Mat- thew had made a collection in Hebrew of the evangelical oracles, and that every one interpreted them according to his ability. $ These evangelical oracles have been erroneously supposed to consist only of a collection of the discourses of the Saviour. The expression oracles has, hovever, a far wider sense, and is applied in the Epistle to the Hebrews to the whole of the Old Testament revelations.§ It is, besides, wholly impossible to separate the greater part of the words * See Luke xv. z. + Eusebius, " H. E." v. xo. { tiarBdiotphf oSr iegatdi ScoX^rr^rd \oy[a ffvwtyQd^aro 1fqti'fMVff€ 8* atfrd Af ^Sdraro ficcurrot. (Eusebius, *' H. E." iii. 39). § Hebrews V.Z2. 10 t46 BOOK FIRST* oJT Christ from the circumstances or acts which were the occasion of thenu Papias had himself written a book on the oracUs of the Lord, which included narratives, properiy so called, as may be seen from the fragments which remain.* It is further certain that Eusebius, and his contemporaries who possessed his work, applied his description to a narra- tive more or less complete, and not to a simple collection of discourses. We believe, then, that Papias had doubtless heard of a Hebrew original of our Matthew ; and as there is no trace of any such existing at the beginning of the second century, we may suppose that it had been already supplanted by our Greek Gospel, which was destined by its very language for a much wider circulation. Clearly this original Hebrew would have an especial interest for the Christians of Judaea, who might have made it the subject of numerous modifi- cations^t The sort of contempt shown by Papias for written tradition, might well explain his inexact information with reference to it ; he avows that he seeks, above all, oral tra- dition, and concerns himself with this alone. In con- sequence of this bias of mind it is that he attaches so little importance to the first Greek Gospel, and places it in the category of those numerous translations of the original Hebrew which were current in the churches. The ex- pression which he uses implies that these translations were regarded as very inexact. " Every one," he says, "trans- lated as he could." A superficial observer like Papias, ex- clusively preoccupied with oral tradition, characterised by these words the very great freedom which was used with the original, in the Greek version of Matthew. This free- * The KvQiaKh. \&yia included, for example, the account of the woman taken in adultery (Eusebius, iii. 39). Papias, after saying that Mark did not give the oracles of the Saviour in con ecutive order, defines thus this word \6yia' \exBivTa 1j ir^axOivra (Eusebius, iii. ^9). f Perhaps it was not in existence in the time of Papias, except in the imperfect and overladen form of the Gospel of the Hebrews. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. {47 dom goes so fat, that we are warranted in regarding the Gospel which we possess as a second original. In truth, the style is that of a first hand ; it flows direct from the fountain ; it has even subtleties of meaning, and sometimes almost a play on words, which is. irreconcilable with the idea of a tianslation.* Every time the evangelist quotes in his own name from the Old Testament,' he recurs to the original Hebrew, while he borrows from the Septua- gint the citations interpolated in the discourses which he reproduces. Evidently this is not the style of a mere trans* lator. Christian antiquity was then acquainted with a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, for which was substituted, in the second century, our Greek Gospel, which is rather a re- casting than a translation. It has been maintained that this Greek Gospel was equally from the hand of the apostle. We do not think so. In the first place, no positive passage can be adduced in support of this assertion, nor can we, on other grounds, suppose the first of our canonical narratives to have been written entirely by the hand of an apostle. Would an ocular witness have introduced such clear and precise chronological data, in a chain of facts and discourses, in which there was evidently only a grouping of events or of sayings, arranged under certain general heads? The divergencies from the Gospel of John, though relating only to secondary points, do not permit us to admit in our Mat- thew another direct witness. An apostle who had not left Jesus Christ throughout His whole ministry, would not have passed over in silence His journeys to Jerusalem ; he would not have limited to Galilee the appearances of the risen One, nor would he have assigned a wrong date to the celebration of the last Passover.f * ^ Aipayi^ovift 6t tell his readers that Simon of C3Tene was the father-in-law of Alexander and Rufus, who were of Rome — a point which would be interesting only to the inhabitants of that city.t The ruling characteristics of the Christianity of Palestine find no place in Mark's narrative. He makes scarcely an allusion to the Jewish oracles, and he gives ex- planations of Hebrew customs, which would have been perfectly needless except to the Gentile world. That which is pre-eminently noticeable is the vivid, energetic character of his narrative, and the warmth of his colouring. This mode of relation was admirably adapted to the practical genius of the Romans, who concerned themselves far less with the idea and the explanation of facts, than with the facts themselves. No narrative is so dramatic as that of Mark. The long discourses given in the two other synoptics are suppressed. The narration is concise and graphic. By unmistakable tokens we know that we have in this Gospel the echo of a direct witness. He calls by his name of Bartimaeus the blind man healed at the gates of Jericho ; he tells us that Jesus, during the storm on the lake of Tiberias, was " in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow." He mentions also the look of love with which Jesus received the rich young man, and the deep sigh which broke from Him as He verified the unbelief of the Jews.J The scene of the passion, and especially the account of Peter's denial, bears the dramatic stamp in full relief and clearness. The general tone of the narrative is opposed absolutely to the view that Mark was only an abbreviator of Matthew and Luke. Such scribal processes were quite foreign to the apostolic age. Mark, in his long sojourns in Jersualem, • Afi^daww, KonrvpUaw (Mark xv. 39). f Mark xv. 21, compared with Romans xvi. 13. I Mark z. 46 ; iv. 38 ; x. ai ; viii. X2. PRELIMmAKT QUESTIONS. I55 doubtless heard the preaching of Matthew, which became subsequently the foundation of the first Gospel ; there is nothing to prevent our admitting that he may have pre- served numerous passages of it in writing. This was a custom already in vogue in the primitive Church, as we have seen in the prologue to Luke's Gospel. In conforming to it, Mark would have acted perfectly naturally. The analogies and discrepancies of the two Gospels would be thus explained. The omission of the portions especially designed for an audience of Jewish Christians, in the preaching of Matthew, and yet more the peculiar turn of the preaching of Peter at Rome, give a unique character to Mark's narrative. That which it presents to us is, in truth, not Messiah fulfilling the ancient covenant, but the Son of God displaying supernatural power for the salva- tion of the world. If the Gospel of Matthew is the Gospel of fulfilment, Mark's is the Gospel of divine power mani- fested in Jesus Christ. * It was not enough that the preaching of the Gospel should win the Gentile world by the simple operation of the first missions ; it was needful that the national barriers, lowered under the action of an irresistible expansive impulse, should be formally levelled to the ground, and the recogni- tion fully made, that in Christ " there is neither Jew nor Greek." It was not only the new religious society which w.is to grow and extend itself; its doctrine was to expand, or rather to free itself from all Jewish prejudices. Many a conflict had to be passed through before the great truth was fully brought to the light, that Christianity is not the • Strauss (new " Life of Jesus," p. i^ j) sees ia the Gospel of Mark a writing inspired by the tendency to conciliation, which had, according to him, its principal seat at Rome in the middle of the second century. Taking his stand on certain verbal analogies between the second and fourth Gospels, he assigns a i&te. cate to Mctik, as it these analogies might not as well establish the &mecedei'icc oi r/L«.t-k as» ihe contrary. As to the theory of conciliation, it falls, with the whole system of Tubingen, before the impossibility of placing the date of our Gospels in the second century. Ij6 BOOK FIRST. religion of a people, but of mankind. The efforts, the sufferings, the fruitful labours of St. Paul alone assured his victory. We have seen that our two first Gospels, far from reflecting the passions of a narrow Judaised Christianity, set forth, with equal simplicity and breadth, the universality of the Gospel in opposition to the specialities of Judaism. But it was needful that this character of universality should appear, with yet more plainness, in one of the deposits of primitive tradition. This was accomplished in the third Gospel, rightly called the Pauline Gospel. It is no more in contradiction with the first two narratives, than was Paul himself with the twelve. It is as temperate in its univer- sality as Matthew in his Judseo-Christianity. Luke main- tains the perpetuity of the law ; * the prophetic portion of his writings preserves the Hebraic colouring ; t the Jew's right of primogeniture in the kingdom of God is explicitly recognised in the parable of the Prodigal Son. J Clearly there is here neither an exaggeration of Pauline doctrine, nor any desire to tone down contrasts. Numerous and characteristic traits bring out the broard ground taken by the third Gospel. We note the following: the genealogy of Christ, carried back to Adam, to point Him out as the Son of man — the mission of the seventy disciples, which number represented in Jewish symbolism the nations not included in the theocracy — the generous part accorded to the Samaritans who were the first excluded from the divine covenant — ^the determination of the conditions of salvation ascribed to the free pardoning grace of God — lastly, that beautiful tone of merciful humanity and tender pity, which is found so repeatedly in the parables and discourses of Jesus, as rendered by this evangelist.§ A tradition not disputed in Christian antiquity, though of • Luke XX. 17. t Ch. xxii. 30. { Ch. xv. 25—31. § Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son (chap, xv.), of the Good Samaritan (x. 25 — 37), the account of the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain (vii. 12 — 15). PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. X57 later date than that which refers to the first two Gospels, ascribes the third to Luke,* one of the companions of St. Paul, who had followed him to Rome, and whom the apostle mentions in his letter to the Colossiansf as one of his neai friends. As Paul, in his salutations, places his name after the Jews by birth, and between Epaphras and Demas, who were Greek proselytes, it is fair to suppose that Luke was of the same nation. Tradition assigns Antioch as his birth* place ; he was a physician, and consequently a person of cultivation. It is evident from his prologue to the Acts, that he wrote Greek very correctly. Clearly no man was better prepared to become the careful deponent of Gospel tradition, while dwelling by preference on the portions upon which St. Paul had founded his special teaching. The third Gospel is addressed to a man of distinction, according to a common custom of the ancients. It arose, then, like the other cano- nical narratives, out of particular circumstances, and had, like them, that seal of simplicity and truth, which is wanting to books issued with official forms and pretensions. As Matthew's Gospel retains the type of the preaching of the twelve, the Gospel of Luke is the monument of that broader preaching of the thirteenth apostle, who had been preceded on this track by Stephen the Deacon. It is grossly unjust to speak of Luke as a simple compiler ; he is no more so than Mark is an abbreviator. A spirit oi lofty poetry and of simple veracity breathes in this trans- parent narrative, which is more attractive than the other two. There seems no doubt that Luke was acquainted with Mark, whose scripture, especially in its first form, would answer to those narratives without definite order, by which the first evangelist had, as he tells us, profited. { The points * Irenaeus, ** Hseres." iii. 14. Tertul., <* Adv. Marc.,*' 145. Origen in EusebiuB, " H. £." vi. 25. tCoIossians iv. 14. ^ Luke declares that he will write his gospel in order, and going back to the veiy beginning of things {dxptpOs xaBt^) ; he thus implies that X58 BOOK FIRST. of contact and resemblance between Luke and Mark are many. By means of the second Gospel, Luke comes in contact with Matthew, whose Gospel in its Greek form he probably did not know; thus are explained the analogies and differences of our synoptics. As the book of Acts, which comes from the same hand, closes abruptly at the time when St. Paul entered on his imprisonment in Rome, it has been supposed that the third Gospel was concluded at the same period ; that is, about the year 62. But this seems to us in- compatible with the antecedents of the Gospel of Mark. We think it better to keep to the date inscribed in Luke's first work. In fact, we find in his prophetic portion the same expectation of the near return of Christ after the destruction of Jerusalem, which we have noted in Matthew, with this difference, that the expressions are less definite, and admit the possibility of some delay.* We are thus brought back to the period verging on the destruction of Jerusalem : the majority of the second Christian generation, to which, by his own avowal, the friend of St. Paul belonged, were living at the time of the great catastrophe. If we take into ac- count the high antiquity of this Gospel, and the habitual accuracy of the author, carried even into minutiae in some portions of the Acts of the Apostles ; if we remember all the opportunities he had, as the beloved companion of the great Apostle, to receive information at first hand, in Jeru- salem itself, we must admit that in following him we breathe the clear, pure atmosphere of historical truth. It is thus that the primitive tradition of the apostolic Church was fixed for ever in our synoptics ; in them it ap- pears in an individual form, and with a doctrinal seal — the only form in which it could be secured from the ever rest^ ]ess and legendary fluctuations of merely oral tradition. the documents he had before him were wanting! in these two featuret. This reminds us of the characteristic of Mark noted by Papia& and summed up in the words, od rdfeu * Luke xxi. 31, 32. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. I59 III. The fourth Gospel.* The fourth Gospel transports us into a very different region from that of the synoptics. We are carried far beyond the special interests of the Church in Palestine one of whose great aims it was to clench the link which bound it to the old covenant, even while maintaining its own privileges, as the substitute and fulfilment of the old. These questions, so warmly agitated at Jerusalem before the year 70, fall into the background in John's writings. The Pauline polemics, by which the broad human character of Christianity were established, are everywhere taken for granted ; the victory is complete, and no more a matter of * No book of the New Testament has given rise to more ardent pole- mics than this. The history of the disputes over it is one of the most important chapters of modern theology. The first serious attack on the authenticity of the fourth Gospel came from Bretschneider (" Prohabilia de Evang. et Epist. John," 1820). He retracted his doubts. Strauss, in his first ** Life of Christ," revived the controversy. He called forth the writings of Neander and Liicke. The latter has dedicated to the fourth Gospel one of the noblest theological monuments of this age. The School of Tubingen endeavoured to place the fourth Gospel in the middle of the second century, regarding it as the reconciliation of the Judzo- Chiistian and Pauline tendencies m a metaphysical synthesis (Schwegler, •*Nach. Apost. Zeit."ii.346,347; Zeller,** Theologisch. Jahrbuch," 1855, pp. 576—656 ; Baron, *• Gesch. der Chr. Kirche der drei erst. Jahrh.") Ritschl, at first a disciple of the Tiibingen school, retracted his first ideas about the fourth Gospel in the second edition of his book, entitled ** Die Altcatholische Kirche.** Recently M. Renan has laid down a theory of the Gospel of John, quite opposed to the Tubingen school ; but which does not at all re-establish the authenticity of this book, since he supposes every kind of interpolation. Strauss has taken up the polemics, in his new " Vie de J^us," with singular bitterness. Schenkel, in his book, entitled " Characterbild Jesu," is very decided against the genuineness of the fourth Gospel (p. 348). V^eizsaecker has t^en, in his last work, a middle course ; he refers the Gospel to the close of the first century, but attributes it to a friend of St. John ('* Untersuch. ueber die Evang. Ges- chichte,*' p. 187). Thus it nears the hypothesis of M. Nicolas, who ascribes it to John the Presbyter (" Etudes Critiques sur le N. T.,** pp. 206, 207). We have not been able to find an3rthing new in M. Scholten*s work, translated by M. R^ville. Among the remarkable books on St. John, by which we support our views, the principal are Liicke's " Commentary ; '* the part of Bleek*s " Introduction to the New Testament" which refers to this subject, and which has been translated into French by M. Bruston ; the noble " Commentary** of M. F. Godet, so rich and deep ; and M. Astie's important work. X60 BOOK FIRST. controversy ; the deep furrow so painfully made is covered now with ripening grain. The work to be done is not, as in Mark's Gospel, to trace evangelical facts ; the thought at first scarcely indicated, comes out now like the flower from its cup. What we have before us is not the Gospel of ful- filment, nor that of power, nor of Christian universality : it is, according to the beautiful expression of Clement of Alex- andria, the Gospel of the spirit, which, starting from estab- lished data, soars into the region of sublime metaphysics ; it is the Gospel of the ideal, but of the ideal incorporated in a living history. More exact in his narrative, and through- out more profound in his prevailing thought, than the three other evangelists, presenting that blending of pathos and speculation, of tender mysticism and doctrinal elevation, whioh gives it its singular charm, it answers perfectly to the period assigned to it by the oldest tradition, as well as to the known character of its author. In fact, if we contemplate the Church at the close of the first century, in the evening of the apostolic age, we shall see that no teaching could be more appropriate to it than that of the fourth Gospel. A great event has transpired ; the holy city of Judaism is sacked ; the Temple is a heap of ruins. The judgment of God has been executed with de- monstration upon the stiff-necked people ; the ancient mould, into which the Christian idea had been cast in its first form, is broken ; Christianity has shaken off its swaddling clothes, and, freed from all the straits of Judaism, acknowledges it- self the religion of mankind. It is not necessary to bring forward prophetical texts, to declare the abolition of the national privileges ; the will of God is read in characters of fire on the smoking ashes of the ruined sanctuary. The Christ has not appeared on that cloud, from whence burst the thunder-bolts which crushed the pride of Jerusalem. The Church knows now that it is engaged in a long combat und a long travail. Its centre is no longer at Jerusalem, but PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. l6l at Ephesus, the metropolis of Asia Minor, the hrilliant city, where, for long, the thoughts of the East have been meeting and blending with those of the West. Ephesus is the native soil of heresy, of the false Gnosticism which seeks to de- stroy Christianity by interpreting it, that is, by fashioning it to its own likeness. St. Paul noted the first appearance of this bold and skilful essay to fuse the truths of the Gospel in a burning crucible, from which were to come forth so many strange combinations, so many wild speculations. Towards the end of the first century, it assumed, under Cerinthus, a less vague character, and led to a singular system, which, under Christian names, reproduced the old oriental dualism, with its extravagant idealisation. It was not enough to set in opposition to this composite and fan* ciful Christ of the Gnostics the simple Gospel of fact — that Christian drama which availed to conquer the rough Romans ; the moment was come when a Gospel of the idea must be presented, or rather, when the idea must be dis- engaged from the fact, in order to set in full light the deepest portion of the teaching of Christ — that which bears on His nature and His work — if only this might have been pre- served in the mind and heart of some immediate disciple. The most ancient tradition names this disciple ; it is John, the son of Zebedee, the old man matured in faith and thought, the last survivor of the apostles, the venerable saint whose strength was renewed like the eagle's. Under this image of an eagle. Christian antiquity loved to S)anbolise the fourth Gospel, so high did it seem to soar towards the eternal light. ** While the three other evangelists," says St. Augustine, " remain below with the man Christ Jesus, and speak but little of His Godhead, John, as if impatiem of setting his foot on the earth, rises from the very first words of his Gospel, not only above earth, and the span of air and sky, but above all angels and invisible powers, till he reaches Him by whom all things were made. Not in iz X62 BOOK FIRST. vain are we told in the Gospels, that John leaned on the bosom of the Lord at the last Passover feast. He drank in secret at that divine spring. Ex illo pectore in secreto bibe- baf* St. Augustine was right to connect the character of the evangel with that of the evangelist ; for if it be true that a man's style is the man, there is abundant reason to conclude that none but John could have written this incom- parable Scripture. We cannot here do more than broadly indicate the great features of the life and character of St. John. Bom on the shores of the Lake of Tiberias, far from Pharisaic influence, the son of an ardent and pious mother,t whose first care had been to nourish in his heart the hopes which filled her own, he grew up in* an atmosphere most favourable to his preparation for his future mission. The Baptist had no more faithful disciple ; Jesus Christ had none more intimate ; He made John not only His apostle, but His friend. John loved Him as a divine brother ; he could never separate the person of the Master from His doctrine. Of a nature deep and contemplative, he had as much fire in his heart as the im- petuous Peter and the valiant Paul ; but it was an inward fervour, which manifested itself less by action or conflict, than as one of those absorbing affections, concentrated on one object, which are by turns tender and terrible, because they cannot brook to see that object insulted or misjudged. The John of the synoptics is already the well-beloved dis- ciple, but he is also the Son of Thunder ; it is he who would call for fire to come down and consume the impious city that refuses to receive the Lord.} Even after the decisive crisis of his moral life, when he has learnt from his dying Master to what a length pardon* • St. August., " Tractat. 36 in Johann." f Salome, who is erroneously supposed to be a sister of Mary, was of the number of the women who followed Jesus to the last, ministerin? to Him of their substance (Matt, xxviii. 56, comp. with Mark xv. 40, 41). ^ Luke ix. 54. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. 263 ing love can reach, we yet find in him ebullitions of indigna- tion against the adversaries of Jesus, and yet more agains the false friends who could betray Him with a kiss. Thus he speaks with peculiar bitterness of heresy, which is in his e3res the most dangerous of foes. It is John who in his letters would not have the propagator of false doctrine received into the house, nor eaten with ;* and who will not meet Cerinthus even at the public bath.f He is of the race of the mystics and contemplatists ; he speaks their language, and delights in brief sentences not connected by dialectic links. John is the apostle of the absolute. Everything or nothing is his motto ; the opposition between the friends and the enemies of Christ, appears to him strong as that between light and darkness. During the period of triumphant action and sharp polemics, (which is that of Peter and Paul,) he remains in retirement with Mary the mother of Jesus, who is his sacred legacy from the cross ; he is not inactive, but he keeps in the shade, and there matures, as he lives ever mindful of his heavenly Friend, who is also his God. He sees Him, in vision, in the bosom of the Father, as he himself had leaned on His breast in an hour of sorrowful love. J There is nothing to prevent our supposing that in these years of calm and silence he may have, like the other disciples, noted down in writing all the words of Jesus, as the Holy Spirit brought them to his remembrance. If there was one apostle called more than another to preserve the loftiest and tenderest tones of the teaching of Christ, that one was assuredly the beloved disciple. The first time he broke his long silence, men seemed to hear again the voice of ancient prophecy. It was just after the fearful persecution of Nero, on the rock of Patmos, that John wrote the epopoeia of martyrdom; he recounted the sufferings, and proclaimed the triumph, of the * a John, zo. f Eusebiua, iv. 14. } John i. 18. 164 BOOK FIRST. wounded and bleeding Church ;* and this he did, not as d Jew, narrow and infatuated in his prejudices, but as a disciple of that new covenant which embraces all the nations of the earth.f He borrowed nothing from ancient prophecy but its sublime symbols and its tongue of fire, to proclaim the divine judgments. The Son of Thunder reappears in these terrible pages, but we mark also the disciple, the worshipper of Jesus, who is presented to us at once as the Lamb slain, as the Word of God, the Eternal One before whom the whole heavens bow. Under this dazzling drapery, it is the true heart of John which beats, that deep, tender heart, vehement alike in its love and its reprobation. An unchallenged tradition shows him subsequently at Ephesus, the Father venerated by all the churches, present- ing, in his great old age, the purest type of the spiritual priesthood in the new covenant, { changed almost into the image of Him whom he never ceased to contemplate, the living representative of the love which stoops to save that which is lost, as is witnessed by the touching stoxy of the young brigand, followed by the aged apostle into the very haunt of his sin.§ We see him at issue with rising Gnosti- cism, and meeting it hand to hand in his first Epistle. If a Jacob Boehmen was able to rise from the level of a workman's stall to the boldest height of speculation, there can be no impossibility in conceiving that a fisherman of Galilee, * The external proof is conclusive, in our view, in favour of the Reve- lation. Papias based on it his millenarian ideas, according to Andreas (" Praefat. in comment, in Apocalyps"). Justin Martyr quotes directly from it (Dial, cum Tryph.," p. 179). The letter of the martyrs of Lyons makes constant allusions to it (Eusebius, v. i ; Irenaeus, iv. 20) ; Clement of Alexandria (•• Stromat." vi. 66), Tertullian ("Adv. Marc.»* iii. 143), Origen (Eusebius, vi. 25), confirm these testimonies. The doubts ex- pressed about the Revelation by Denys of Alexandria are founded on doctrinal reasons. See in my ** Histoire des Trois Premiers Siicles de TEglise," Vol. ii., p. 491, the note in which I give my reasons for placing the composition of this book before that of the Gospel. + Rev. vii. 9. I n^aXoy TciffOfiriKd^ (Polycrates hi Eusebius, " H.E.'* iii. 5). I Eusebius, " H.£." Ui. 4a. PRBLIMINARY QUBSTIOMS. 163 endowed with a great mind, and borne on the wings of inspiration, may have seen clearly into the speculations of his age, especially if we remember the sacred motive which impelled him to penetrate them ; he was not led on by idle curiosity, but was seeking, by all and any means, to break the accursed spell which was ruining souls. His first Epistle, the genuineness of which is generally admitted,^ is enough to prove that he had really acquired this kind of culture. In the city of Ephesus appears a Gospel which answers to all the requirements of this condition of the age, — a Gos- pel which, in its very prologue, sets the true Christ of the Church in opposition to the Christ of oriental Gnosticism, — in which the history of Jesus is invested with the charms of a tender mysticism, in which the contest between the powers of good and evil forms the very basis of the narra- tive, in every page of which words of pathos touch the heart to its depths, in which more than one trait of marvel- lous exactness reveals the ocular witness; — a Gospel, in short, in which the whole disposition of events is so perfect, that it at once commends itself to the mind. The style is much more correct than that of Matthew and Mark, although the Hebraic element is recognisable in the sententious turn of phrase ; it is evident that the author had long lived in a Greek atmosphere, and had come to breathe it naturally, f It is also evident from his perfect acquaintance with the peculiar institutions of Judaism that he was a Jew by birth; • Papias in Euscbius, " H.E." iii. 39 ; Polycarp, " Ad Philipp/' vii.; Irenaeus, *' Contr. Hseres." iii. 16 ; Clement of Alexandria, " Stromat." ii. 889 ; Tertullian, ** Ad Praxeam," xv. f The author of the fourth Gospel is perfectly familiar with the pe- culiar conditions of Judaism, with Jewish laws and feasts, and with the text of the Old Testament (ii. 13 ; xii. i ; xviii. 15). He inserts, when occasion calls for it, the original Hebrew. See xi. 39, 40, which is a translation of Isaiah vi. 10. See also xiii. 18, which is a translation of Psalm xli. xo. On the other hand he gives explanations of Jewish cus- toms which would have been needless to his countrymen (i. 38; i. 6: xi. 18 ; xiz. 20}. He speaks of the Jews as of foreigners : ol 'lov5aioi (V. 1). 1 66 BOOK FIRST. but the great freedom with which he speaks of his country* men, pointing out his separation from them, shows how entirely he had shaken off the yoke of the Sjmagogue. Never was there, between a writer and his book, a more striking accordance than between the fourth Gospel and the character of John, such as the history of the first century reveals him to us. Let us add that the author designates himself in a manner which, though indirect, is unmistak- able. He was an ocular witness of that which he recounts. " We beheld his glory," says he, speaking of Jesus Christ, "the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.*'* He is spoken of more than once in the fourth Gospel, as the disciple whom Jesus loved, and the narrative is distinctly ascribed to him.f Now this beloved disciple can be only one of the three apostles who were in close intimacy with the Saviour. He is distinguished from Peter, $ and he cannot be James the Greater, who was slain by Herod Agrippa. We must then recognise in him John the son of Zebedee.§ The highest tradition of the ancient Church confirms the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, and attributes it to John by a body of testimony which consti« tutes valid evidence. We will not pass in review the passages by which we are certified of the universal and entire acceptance of our four Gospels in the second century. But, on account of the im- portance of the point at issue, we will quote the principal passages which establish the authenticity of John's Gospel. It is well known that in the age of Origen, of Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, no doubt existed as to its genu- ineness. || The testimony of Irenseus is of yet more conse- * John i. 14. f Ch. xxi. 20, 24. X Ch. xiii. 24; xx. 2; xxi. 20. § John was the only one who could speak of John the Baptist, calling him simply John, because he knew that he could not be confounded with himself in the book which was from his own hand. IJ Irenseus, •* C. Haeres." iii. 11 ; Tertullian, " Adv. Marc." jv. 2, 3, Ongen*s " Commentary on St. John," Vol. iv. of Huet. PRELIMINARY QUBSTIONS. 167 quence to us. His millenarian speculations and bold allegories, of which Strauss makes so much, do not prevent his being separated from John by only one intermediary ; vix.f Polycarp, at whose feet he passed his youth. The bishop of Lyons would not express himself with such per- fect assurance upon the Gospel of John, if Polycarp had not spoken to him of it ; the silence of his master on such a book would have been to him a reason for doubting its authenticity; it would have withheld him from any cate- gorical statements with reference to it. Polycarp himself came to Rome about the year 163, at a time when the fourth Gospel was accepted by that great Church, as is proved by Muratori's canon, which expressly recognises its admission at the centre of western Christianity. Is it to be supposed that the friend of St. John would have sanctioned, by his silence, a fraud so censurable as the fabrication of such a work ? If he uttered any protest, Irenseus could not have been ignorant of it. His testimony therefore carries with it, by implication, that of Polycarp. Theophilus of Antioch (176) furnishes us with the first explicit passage which is wholly undisputed.* ApoUinaris of Hierapoli8,t interpos- ing in the year 170 in the dispute upon the celebration of the Passover, points out the discrepancies of the Gospels on this point, which implies that he was acquainted with our four canonical narratives. Polycrates of Ephesus speaks of John as the disciple who leaned on the bosom of Jesus ; now he could only have learned this fact from the fourth Gospel. $ Justin Martyr borrows from him thoroughly characteristic words, such as these : "Jesus Christ said, Except ye be bom again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." And " it is mani- * *0$€w iiido'KWfftM ^fjuis aZ Sytat yqa^al rat rdpret ol Tr9€VfiaT»p6Qoi, i^ Qw ^lud^rrft Xeyct. *Ep dffx^ ^ * X^o* (Theophil. " Ad Antalyc." ii. 22). f *' Chron. Paschale," p. 14. Appollinaris mentions also the piercing of the side of Jesus, in evident allusion to John xix. 34. ; Eusebius, *• H. £.** v. 24. X68 BOOK FIRST. fest to all that it is impossible for those who have been once bom to enter into the wombs of those that bare them." That which is more weighty than a few quotations, is Justin's prevailing point of view ; his doctrine of the Word is entirely drawn from the fourth Gospel. The apostolic Fathers allude to passages of St. John. We read these words in the undisputed portion of the letter of Ignatius to the Romans : '* I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and I desire the drink of God, His blood."1- Polycarp, to whose testimony we have already alluded, quotes the First Epistle of John in his letter to the Philippians4 Papias does the same in the short fragment of his which we possess ; there is nothing to prove that in other portions of his writings, now lost, this Father may not have quoted the fourth Gospel.§ At any rate, all testimony given to the first Epistle reflects on this, so evident is it that the two scriptures are by the same hand. In the apostolic Fathers, as in Justin Martyr, there are more than texts and allusions, — ^there is a peculiar mode of thought and speech, a doctrinal type, which carries us back to St. John. Whence could Ignatius, and Polycarp, and the unknown author of the epistle to Diognetus have derived the doctrine of the Word — flight and life of the world — if not in this great school ? Heresy in the second century is not less positive than orthodoxy, as to the authenticity of the Gospel of John. Alike * Justin, Apol. i. 6x. It is pretended this quotation may be from Matt, xviii. i8, but the second clause of the sentence does not permit this interpretation. In order to hold with Strauss, that Justin took his quotation from the " Clementines,** where it is in fact found, it would be needful to prove that the reverse was not the case. What would be gained, besides, on the supposition of a quotatiop from the " Clemen- tines,*' since it is certain that they quote directly from the fourth Gospel ? See the other quotations of Justin, " Apol." ii. 6 ; ** Dial. c. Tryph.*' Ixiii. f *'AfiT sequence of a false interpretation of the words of Jesus (John xxi. 21, 2a) t72 BOOK FIRST. with age, he was carried into the holy assembly to sum up all his life and all his teaching in the words, "My little children, love one another.'* From all these passages it follows not only that the Gospel of John was accepted, in the year 170, by the uni- versal Church in all its sections in the east and west, but that testimonies, conclusive by their number and value, carry us back to Justin Martyr, and from Justin Martyr to the very confines of the apostolic age. Yet more ; heresy unites with orthodoxy in guaranteeing the authenticity of this book, the traces of which are found throughout the ecclesiastical literature of that time and of all times. It ap- pears to us that we must for ever give up the appeal to histo- rical proof, if it may be branded with suspicion when it appears in such accumulation. Nothing is more vain than to seek to evolve from the movement of thought in the second century, that Gospel, which was itself the impulse of the movement and its guiding force. Doubtless the same hypothesis will yet reappear, for the human mind is inexhaustible in its resources for self-deception, but it will not long endure a critical ex- amination. M. Renan has set aside lightly, and without discussion, the conclusions of Baur— of so littl<^ weight did they appear to him — and has assigned our Gospel to the date indicated. Upon the question as to what author is to be accredited with this document of the first century, opinions are divided ; some name John the presbyter, a mysterious personage of the apostolic age known only by name ; * they ground their opinion on the designation of elder, or presbyter, placed at the head of the Second Epistle of John, f Others speak of the nameless conclave around this apostle, which they call the school of Ephesus.J In favour of the first hypo- thesis is urged the difficulty of ascribing the fourth Gospel * M. Nicholas, * Etudes Critiques sur le Nouv. Test./* p. 206. f 3 John i. { M. Renan, ** Introduction to the Life of Jesus.**^ PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. I73 to the son of Zebedee. This objection we have already met. When we are told that no apostle is ever called an elder or presbyter, we content ourselves with citing the following text from St. Peter : ** The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ."* The advocates of the second hypothesis complain of the excessive idealisation of the fourth Gospel ; according to them, the deeds and discourses of the Saviour are reproduced in it with extreme freedom, or rather, they are re-fused in the crucible of the ardent enthusiasm fired at Ephesus by the words of John. An ocular witness, an apostle, might indeed inspire a narrative of this sort, but he could not himself write it, and transfigure to such a degree the history which had been enacted before his eyes.^t To which we reply, that in a time of scrupulous adherence to apostolical tradition, it is impossible to suppose so bold a deviation, on the part of John's auditors and disciples from the teaching delivered to them by him ; nothing could be more contrary to the custom of the time. Nor is any passage brought forward in support of this supposition, in- vented only, as we shall soon see, to establish another no less arbitrary ; for we dispute the character of exagge- rated idealisation attributed to the fourth Gospel. The same hypothesis had been already developed in France with far less disguise. St. John, it has been pre- tended, in his extreme old age, hardly recognised himself in the midst of the contradictory influences by which he was assailed at Ephesus ; but, very jealous of his credit, he dic- tated before he died, some vague and incoherent narratives, semi-gnostic in substance, but tolerably correct in date, and, above all, very personal, he betraying no little jealousy of his companions in labour, especially of Peter. These recitals • 'O ffv/iTp€{rP&Te2oi (i Pet. v. i). f WeisBaecker, " Ueber die Evangelische Ge«chichte," 1864, p. 289. This very remarkable work, exhibiting the loftiest intellect, carnes the arbitraiy much too far in questions of criticism. Z74 BOOK FIRST. were 80 arranged as to serve his petty rancours, and to set his own character in the light, with that skill which never forsook him even before the cross of his Master, and after the martyrdom of his friends. Naturally, the disciples of the old apostle thought it no wrong to arrange in their own method such a document, and to introduce into it subtle metaphysics* and utterances ''crude and clumsy," such as the prayer in chapter xvii.* " Pretentious, weary, ill- written tirades !" ex- claims a refined critic, as he quotes those pages before which we bow and worship. There can be no reply to such a judgment, for the elements of a common appreciation are wanting. As to those petty and ignoble passioffs which are said to have inspired John's most pathetic narratives, we leave such insinuations to the conscience which is able to distinguish the grand and the pure from the base and vile, and does not confound the mean rivalries of acrimonious men of letters with the noble fraternity of the apostles. But that which fairly comes under a critical examination is the unity of the work, which is demonstrated by the unity of plan and of style, and by the perfect harmony between the thought and the language, which betokens something very different from the babblings of an old man, recompiled by his disciples. In truth, from the first chapter to the last, the history of Jesus is unfolded tn one uniform plan, descending into the minutest detail. The fundamental idea ofthis Gospel is plainly set forth in its conclusion : " These things were written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through His name.**t In the prologue Jesus is represented as the Son of God, bringing life and light to the world He had created; He is the Word " made flesh," and dwelling among men, " full of grace and truth," received by those who are born of God, rejected by others. All the first part of the Gospel, from chapter i. to xiii., traces out * M. Renan, " Life of Jesus.'* Introduction, p. 22. f John xx. 31. PRELIMIMA&7 QUBSTI0N8. 175 this manifestation of the Word to men, and its twofold efTect, in a circle ever widening till the final conflict comes. From chapter sdii. to xviii. we have the confidential revelations of Jesus to His disciples — all the scenes in the upper chamber. In chapters xviii. and xix. we witness the crisis of the con- flict ; even at the foot of the cross we find the great division between those who love and those who hate, between the children of light and the children of darkness. Chapter xx. is devoted to the resurrection. With this firmly marked out- line, the narrative proceeds in clear and consistent order ; the chronological divisions are distinct, and the style is always uniform. It is to us, then, an established truth, that the fourth Gospel is no mosaic of texts proceeding from many hands, the prolix stories of an old man, revised and com- pleted by his friends, but a book deeply impressed with the seal of unity. This characteristic did not escape Strauss, who calls the author of this book thtCorreggio of the evange- lists, and admires his inimitable art in distributing the light and shade, so as to produce such impressive effects. Such an estimate is widely removed from that of the French critic ; the two judgments contradict each other : where the one sees clumsy metaphysics, the other recognises the finish of art* To us it is the true sublimity of the divine, embodied in the truest human form. Having now established the unity of the structure of this Gospel (chapter xxi. always excepted), and having set aside the hypothesis of a composite work, the produce of many hands and of numerous emendations, we proceed to the ob- lections drawn from the book itself. The inaccuracies of the narrative are urged. Their small importance transmutes the objection into aproof in its favour,* * Objection is made to chap. i. 28 — the passage which points out the spot where John was baptizing, under the name of Bethany — as if the historian who has marked so exactly the locality of the village of Laiams could confound it with a place so distant from Jerusalem, and as if it were not possible to suppose a second Bethany in Persea. Objection is 176 BOOK FIRST. and we pass on to more specious arguments. In order to deprive the fourth Gospel of its historical character, there is an insisting upon the points in which it differs from the synoptics ; the conclusion is drawn that there is a wide de- parture in this account from primitive tradition. We have al- ready shown that the two forms of the narrative rest upon the same historical hasis, — ^that the s3moptics imply the journeys to Jerusalem, as the fourth Gospel implies the work in Galilee. There remains, no doubt, one difficulty hitherto insoluble — the difference in the date given for the death of the Saviour — ^which the fourth Gospel places on the 14th of Nisan, that is to say, on the day of preparation for the feast, while the S3moptics speak of the paschal supper as taking place on the very day of the festival, from which it follows that the cruci- fixion must have taken place on the 15th of Nisan.* But the account of the fourth Gospel is the most in conformity with the usages of Judaism, which made the day of the Passover an exceptional day, on which the sabbatical regu- lations were enforced with an inflexible rigour,t incompatible again taken to John iv. 5, where Sychar is put instead of Sychem. The mere admission of a difference of pronunciation in the dialects of the time is enough to obviate the difficulty. If the author calls Caiaphas the high priest that year (xWii. 13), there is no reason to conclude that he represents the high priesthood as an annual office. It is certain that it was subject at this period to frequent mutations. The expression employed is in no way extraordinary. (See Bleek, " Einleit. in N. T." p. 208.) * According to the synoptics, Jesus really ate the paschal lamb on the same day as the Jews (Matt. xxvi. 17 ; Mark xiv. 12, 16; Luke xxii. 7, 9). The day of His death would then be the 15th of Nisan, the great day of the feast. According to John, on the other hand, the Lord was crucified on the day of preparation for the feast, that is, on the 14th of Nisan (John xiii. i, 29; xviii. 28; xix. 14 — ^31). The expedient pro- posed for evading the difficulty appears to us insufficient, as we shall ahow in the account of the Passion. + The 15th of Nisan was regarded as a feast as solemn as that of the Saobath. All work was forbidden, except the preparation of the ele- ments (Exod. xii. 16). This concession is withdrawn in Leviticus and in Numbers (Lev. xxiii. 7 ; Numb, xxviii. 18). The Talmud made these restrictions yet more severe. How can we suppose, on such a day, all the judicial apparatus implied in the synoptical account ? According to Josephus, the Romans respected the Jewish Sabbath (" Ant." xvi. 6, 2). See Bleek^s work already quoted, p. zSa. FRBLIMINA&T QUESTIONS. X77 with the trial of a great cause by the Sanhedrim, with the preparation of sweet spices by the holy women attached to the Saviour,* and the return from the fields of Simon of Cyrene.f To allow of Barabbas being released in time, we must sup« pose the Passover to have been not yet eaten. It is in vain to urge in objection, the well-known practice of the apostle John, who celebrated the Passover on the 14th of Nisan conformably to the tradition of the S3moptics. What John celebrated on that day was not the Christian Passover, pro- perly so called, the observance of which was not as yet either general or determined, but the Jewish Passover ; in this he only followed the decisions of the council at Jerusalem, ac- cording to which the Christians of Jewish extraction were to respect the customs of their nation. These decisions had fallen, in many points, into desuetude, but there is nothing to show that John did not continue to act in comformity with them. In any case, as he did not claim to be celebrating the institution of the Lord's supper, his practice gives no contradiction to the narrative ascribed to him.} It is impos- sible to deny the superiority of the fourth Gospel in the logical statement of facts. It alone gives a sufficient explanation of the decisive crisis which led to the condemnation of Christ, by tracing in broad outline His disputes with the Sanhedrim, and by relating in detail the most astonishing of His miracles wrought at the gates of the Holy City. No argument can be drawn from the blanks observable in his narrative. The author was acquainted with the synoptics, and did not feel himself called to reproduce their records ; there is, besides, nothing systematic in these omissions, as if he had inten- tionally, and with a set purpose, avoided those circumstances which would bring out prominently the humanity of Christ : he has described Him to us as overcome with weariness and grief, and it is he who records His cry of anguish in the tem- ple, which is indeed the earnest of the groans of Gethsemane : * Lttke xxiii. 56. f Mark xv. 2Z« X Bleek*8 work, previoasly quoted* 12 178 BOOK FIRST. ** Now 18 my soul troubled, and what shall I say ? Father, save me from this hour : but for this cause came I to this hour."* It has been again objected to our evangelist, that he has suppressed all gradation in the manifestation of Messiah, while in the synoptics Jesus reveals Himself only by degrees, and according to circumstances.f But it must be remembered, that John passes over in silence an important portion of the career of Christ in Galilee, and that his great design is to give us the highest and deepest revelations of the Master concerning Himself. We maintain, however, that, lofty as is the point from which this evangelist starts, he does, nevertheless, bring out a progressive revelation of the glory of Christ, from the first discourse at Cana to the Aublime communications of the upper chamber. It is the discourses of the fourth Gospel, however, which are most strongly assailed. On the one hand, their anti- Judaic and metaphysical character is exaggerated, as, on the other, the pretended Judaism of the synoptics is inordi- nately pressed. There is an endeavour to establish as marked an opposition between our Gospel and its assumed author, as between Gnosticism and fanatical Judaso-Chris- tianity. The conclusion lies on the surface. This Gospel, it is said, could not have come from a medium so opposed to the spirit which animates it. It is the product of Gnosti- cism, and of a Gnosticism far enough advanced to treat with the opposing doctrine, as one power with another ; it is, then, nothing else than the treaty of peace signed in the middle of the second century, between Paulinism and Judao- Christianity, upon the cloudy heights of metaphysics. We will not stay to refute this extreme' opinion, represented with so much brilliance by the development school. His- torical evidence has sufficed to set it aside. But its main point is still held.J A pretented doctrinal incompatibility is always asserted between the fourth Gospel and the synop- ♦ John xii. 27. t Schenkel. X Schcukcl and Strauss have recently taken it up. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. I79 tics; and, in consequence, between the Scripture ascribed to John, and John himself, who was one of the twelve. This opposition vanishes before an attentive examination. Neither are the S3moptics imbued with a Judaistic spirit to the degree pretended, nor is the fourth Gospel as anti- Judaistic as is afErmed. We have already brought out the elements of universality contained in our three first canon- ical narratives. Matthew, like Luke, admits a wide exten- sion of the kingdom of God ; the baptismal formula suffices to vindicate for the Gospel of the twelve, the character of a world-wide Christianity, and the elements of the metaphysics of the fourth Gospel. The first chapters of Matthew and Luke contain the most explicit commentary on the famous text, " The Word was made flesh."* On the other hand, the Gospel assigned to St. John fully recognises the privi- leges of the old covenant, as proved by the divine words, " Salvation is of the Jews."t This one utterance refutes absolutely the presence of even the most modified Gnosti- cism. There is an attempt to make John one of the heads of J udaeo- Christianity, in order to deprive him of the honour of having written the Gospel of the spirit. No one disputes that he, like the other disciples, started with the most materialistic ideas of the kingdom of Messiah, and that he stood in need of a great moral transformation. But, after the Pentecost, we do not see him taking any prominent part in the Church of the upper chamber ; he hastened to support the proselytising movement which had declared itself in Samaria ;| at the time of the Council at Jerusalem he held out the hand of fellowship to the apostle of the Gentiles, as we learn from the famous passage in the Epistle to the Galatians, so controverted of late years, but so plain to the unbiassed mind.§ What difficulty is there • John i. 14. t Ch. iv. 22. J Acts viii. 14. 6 ** And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, per- ceived the grace that was given to me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the tirci.ir..' -on " (G •!. ii. 9). l8o BOOK FIRST. in supposing that, nnder the teachings of experience, and under the influence of inspiration, the great soul of John may have gradually expanded ? Against this is urged the ardent Judaism of the Revelation, but this we have already reduced to its just value ; we have traced in it, in a form necessarily borrowed from ancient prophecy, the funda- mental doctrines of the fourth Gospel ; namely, adoration of the Word, redemptive sacrifice, and salvation for all nations. The representation of the last judgment, preceded by so many preliminary judgments ; the description of the resurrection of the dead, and of the glorious return of Christ, recall, doubtless, the fervid colouring of the Hebrew prophets ; but there is nothing in these words in opposition to the Gospel, which, by the admission of the most eminent opponent of the authenticity of the Revelation, did not stop at a purely moral conception of judgment and the resurrec- tion.* So far from the author of the fourth Gospel having borrowed from Gnosticism the terms, the Word, the Life, the Light, the only begotten Son, it was Gnosticism which took from him these metaphysical expressions ; they had, in truth, the double advantage of lending themselves to subtle interpretations, while they were consecrated by the reverence of the Church. We do not deny that John spoke, in a measure, the philosophical language of his age and his contemporaries. There is nothing more strange in this than in Paurs quoting classic poetxy at Athens. Only, it can never be established that, with the words, John appro- priated the thought; for nothing is more opposed to his prologue than Platonic dualism, or the false idealism of the East. Gnosticism was sufficiently advanced at Ephesus, at the close of the first century, for there to be a perfect response in the fourth Gospel to the mental condition of the times. Through the Philosophoumena we watch the deve- lopment of heresy, and the wild systems made known to * See LQcke*t ** Commentary on John,'* v. aS, 29. PRBLIMINARY QUESTIONS. l8l US by the books of Hippolytus, cany us back definitely to the times of St. John.* One last question remains to be examined ; it is closely connected with the foregoing. Several theologians, who admit the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, deny its histo- rical character, precisely on the ground of the discourses which it contains. They regard it as only an essay of Christian metaphysics, developing the favourite ideas of the author.f Facts are entirely subordinated to doctrines, and are rather S3anbols than records. In support of this, the difference of language is adduced between the S3moptic8 and the narrative of John. In the latter, it is said, are found neither parables nor axiomatic sayings — ^nothing resembling the popular and striking tone of Christ*s discourses, as given in Matthew and Luke — nothing that recalls that transparent clearness, that admirable adaptation to circumstances and to His audience ; but, on the contrary, expositions always profound, turning on the most abstruse points of doctrine, sententiously expressed — such, in fact, as we meet in the Epistle of John. Let us first remark, that the same man may employ different modes of speech, according to the nature of the subjects of which he treats. Whatever share may be assigned to invention in the dialogues of Plato, it is certain that they correspond to one phase of the teaching of Socrates. Now there is assuredly as great a distance be- tween his discourses in Xenophon and in Plato, as between the rabbi of the synoptics and the Christ of St. John. The fourth Gospel leaves on one side the ministry in Galilee, which was carried on in the midst of the common people ; it passes especially under our review the disputes of Christ with the ^Pharisaic school at the centre of the hierarchy, * See the chapter in my " Histoire des Trois Premiers Siides de TEglise Chr6tienne,'* on the " Early Gnostics," Vol. ii. f M. Reuss is the most eminent exponent of this view. " Die Gesch. Heil. Schr." N. T., § 219. ** Histoire de la Tbtelog. du Slide Apo8to- lique," VoL i., 2nd edition, p. 395. 1 82 BOOK FIRST. and it closes with the sacred revelations of the upper chamber. But let us not exaggerate even here ; in the discourses which John records there is many a parabolic turn familiar to Jesus ; we instance the allusion to the living water and to the manna, the similitude of the good shepherd and the hireling, and that of the vine and the branches.* Nor is it more correct to pretend that in the fourth Gospel the teaching of Christ is always in a didactic form ; He does not speak to the Samaritan woman in the same manner as to Nicodemus ; the dialogue is perfectly natural in its form, and lends itself to the various incidents which arise. At Jerusalem, confronted with the representatives of a form- alistic tradition, claiming Moses as its founder, Jesus invokes the name of the great legislator; He contrasts Abraham with those who pride themselves on being his descendants.f With His disciples, at the parting hour. His language is entirely changed, and assumes a tender mysticism perfectly appropriate to those solemn moments. There is nothing fictitious in the historical framework of the narrative ; it is marvellously truthful. Geographical accuracy is not neg- lected. The sacred historian recalls little incidental circum- stances such as would not be invented. This discourse was uttered in Solomon's porch, J that near the treasury in the temple ; § on another occasion, we are told it was night.|| The last conversation of Jesus with His disciples is broken by the words, " Arise, let us go hence,"^ words which no- thing but a faithful recollection would have so introduced. It has been observed, with much justice, that the author of the fourth Gospel nowhere puts into the mouth of Jesus the metaphysical terms usfed by himself in his own name in the prologue. Jesus never calls Himself the Word ; the expres- sions light and life do not retain, in the discourses, the • John iv, lo— la; vi. 32, 33; x. zx~Z4; xv. 16. $ Ch. viii. 20. + Ch. V. 45 ; viii. 55. jl Ch. xiii. 30. t Ch. X. 23 f Ch. xiv. 31. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. xSj profound and metaphysical meaning which they bear in the introduction to the Gospel ; they have simply the current acceptation.* Sometimes the interpretation which the evangelist gives of the words of the Master appears subtle ; he endeavours to solve a real difficulty, and without denying that he succeeds, it may yet be said that he would assuredly not have brought forward such and such a hard saying, if he had not received it from the lips of the Master.f But there is a fact more conclusive still. So little did John draw from his own mind the sublime metaphysics of the discourses of Jesus, that these metaphysics were known and admitted in the Church before even the first line of our synoptical Gospel was written. They form the basis of the teaching of St. Paul, in his letters to the Colossians and Ephesians. Nearly half a century before the composition of our fourth Gospel, the apostle of the Gentiles had declared that all things were created by the eternal Christ, and for Him, and that all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily. X In the Epistle to the Romans, the genuineness of which is uncontroverted, he had said that God has given us His Son, and that after such a gift He would assuredly freely give us all things. § The apostle Peter, in his first Epistle, written ten years later, but nearly thirty years before the fourth Gospel, explicitly avowed the pre-existence of Jesus ; for he boldly spoke of the spirit of prophecy as the ** spirit of Christ." || We have pointed out in the synoptics passages implying the same doctrine. Thus, so far from these exalted metaphysics being an invention of the school of Ephesus, at the close of the first century, they formed an integral part of primitive tradition, from the time that this comes within our grasp in a written form. We know the * Weirsacker, " Untersuch. Ober. die Evang. Geschichte" p. 257. The famous argument in John x. 35 would never have been invented by the author of the prologue. f See John ii. 19 — 2z. § Romans viii. 3a. X Colossians i. x6 — 19. || i Peter i. zi. X84 BOOK FIRST. reasons which made the beloved disciple their most tnisty^ guardian ; he had laid them op in his heart, and there is nothing to hinder the supposition that he may have early committed his reminiscences to his tablets. In any case, he preached his doctrine long before he composed his Gospel. Now, I asky whence could these metaphysics havo been drawn in the primitive Church at these remote times f They might find some points of cormection, so to speak, in the national literature; as, for example, in the growing personification of Wisdom, which we have noted in, the Proverbs and the Apocrypha ; but they were none the less in collision with all Jewish prejudices and all Gentile ideas. They could have had no other source than the teaching of Jesus. The ideal character of the Gospel of John is in no way incompatible with its claims as a history ; the psychological insight which makes him discern and depict, in the contest between Jesus and the other Jews, the opposition between light and darkness ; the sublime conception of love, which sees its elevation and triumph in its very humiliation, — all these lofty ideas correspond to great realities. We should not be ready to grant that historians, who, by a powerful generalisation, evolve from events their inner meaning, are thereby taxable with inexactness. Fidelity is not the monopoly of chroniclers. Has not the title of historian been always reserved for those who have been able to show the concatenation of events, and to discern their secret springs 7 If we are taxed with the analogy which exists between the style of the first Epistle of John and that of the fourth Gospel, we ask first, if it seems more probable that Jesus should have moulded the mind of His disciple, or that the disciple should have fashioned the Master in his own image, af^er having proclaimed Him God ? That some part is to be assigned to John's individuality in the reproduction of PRELIlflNARY QCBSTIONS. 185 the discourses of his Master, we are quite ready to concede ; he translated and compiled them ; he could not give them in their entirety, nor reproduce, with perfect exactness, their original form ; hut in substance, and in all important features, these are the original discourses!, and it is Jesus, and not John, to whom we listen. It is derogatory to this Gospel to regard it as simply the supplement of the synoptics, or a refutation of the errors of the times ; it supplements and it refutes by the simple fact, that it recounts the evangelical history subsequently to the first canonical narratives, and in the midst of heresies, of which it necessarily takes note, while it yet claims to give us, in a positive and individual form, all the history of Christ. We possess in it the epitome of the teaching of the last of the apostles— of him who was nearest to the heart of Jesus. It was written at the solicitation of the Christians of Ephe* sus, after they had fasted and prayed to know the will of God ; and thus they received from the hands of St. John the living portrait of Jesus, so much the more faithful because presenting a more lofty ideal.* We have vindicated the trustworthiness of the four canonical Gospels. They are to us more than mere docu^ ments } they are the voice of the apostolic Church speaking at four dififerent perioda of her development. Every narra- tive adds some trait to the image of the Redeemer ; and yet, all together, they are still only the mirror " in which we see but imperfectly," until the day of direct vision. They transmit to us, with an extraordinary vitality, the breath of inspiration which animated the Church of the apostles. * We have the following passage, touchtn|; the Gospel of John, in Muratori*8 **Canon :" — ** Cohortantibfis condisetpulis etepiscopissuis, dixit: eonjejunatt mihi hodie trio tt quid cuiqut fusrit T$velatum^ alterutrum nobis fnarremus, E&dem nocte revetatum Andrea et apostolis^ ut reeognoscentibus cunctis yohannes sua nomine cuncta describeret" St. Jerome preserves a similar tradition : '* Coactus 4st ab omnibus pens Asia episcofis *'• multorum eccUsiarum Ugationibus dedivinitaU Salvatoris altius scrtbsreti (Hiexonym., '* Pnefat. in Matth."). l86 BOOK FIRST. This divine seal reveals itself to the heart, and if there is mysticism in discerning it in our four Gospels, we readily plead guilty to the charge. Apart from this, however, we have reasons enough, based on positive information, for concluding that our four canonical narratives are historical documents, dating from the first century. We are not, therefore, at liberty to alter them at our pleasure — to treat them as a kind of mosaic, fragments of which may be capriciously detached and rearranged in artificial combinations. Such a method might be reasonable if our S3moptics were only a mass of doubtful traditions, with no other uniting bond than an accidental juxtaposition. But it is not so ; they give us a consecutive narrative, arranged on a definite plan ; we are therefore bound to take account of this plan, to explain the particular by the general, and constantly to compare our four Gospels one with another. This is our only way of escape from that unrestrained use of the arbitrary method, so common in reference to the Gospels, blending, dividing, and mutilating texts the most distinct and complete ; treat- ing the Gospel history, in a word, like a metal in fushion, that may be poured at will into any mould. Truth loses much by such methods of dealing with her; which are deprived of all excuse, so soon as our canonical narratives are admitted to bear the double impress of the time of their origin, and the writers to whom we owe them. There must be an end of that divination which detaches texts, gently or otherwise, from the context, in order to educe from them a preconceived idea — ^a sure method of discovering everywhere one's own thought. A comparative study of the Gospels, which respects the order of time, and seeks to determine it with the most scrupulous care, costs more labour, but it brings more gain to the searcher after truth. PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. tSj CHAPTER V. DOCTRINAL BASES OF THE LIFE OF JESUS. n^HE doctrinal and strictly theological does not come ^ within the scope of this book. It is not my province, then, to establish here the great doctrine which is to me the central point of Christianity — ^the Divinity of Christ, and His incarnation. Occasion will hereafter naturally arise for touching on this in the portion of my work devoted to the teaching of Jesus ; it will be necessary to examine whether or not He truly asserts Himself to be the Son of God. Apart from this, His Divinity will shine forth from the en- tire history, beaming in every manifestation of Himself in the Gospel times. Let it suffice for me to say here that I accept unreservedly the prologue of John's Gospel ; it is to me the necessary introduction to the life of Jesus. Taken in itself, apart from, the subtle commentaries of the metaphysicians of the fourth century, it gives us a grand and simple idea of the Re- deemer of the world. By its first words it raises us to the highest conception of God, showing Him to us before the world and before time, in the very mystery of the Divine life, the eternal realisation of love, the union of the Father and the Son. " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Over this relation of Father and Son hangs a sacred veil which no human theory can pierce; for analogies are wanting, and language is unequal to the weight of such thoughts. The lightning gleam which illuminates these depths reveals to us a living, loving God, who does not need to seek in the created world the object of His love, but finds it in the Being ' t88 BOOK FIRST. like Himself, who is His perfect image. To create is not, then, a necessity with Him, as if only by producing a worid could He emerge finom an inert solitude. Creation is a free act, an act of love, accomplished by the Word. " All things were created by Him and for Him, and without Him was not anything created that was created." The moral creation is not His work only, but also His reflection and manifestation. ** In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. He is that true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." There is, then, a natural and primordial relation between mankind and the Word. The nobler life of man is a communication of the Word. On this relation is based the possibility of the incarnation of the Son of God ; for it is evident that human nature realises its ideal in Him, since in Him it finds the plenitude of moral life. According to the prologue of John, the uncreated light of the Word shed some rays into the night of a world sepa- rated from God. ** The light shineth in darkness." But when the world is to be redeemed and saved, and man lifted up to God, then *^ the Word is made flesh ;" which signifies, not simply that He put on a human body, but became truly man, and subject to all the conditions of our existence. Jesus Christ is not the Son of God hidden in the Son of man, retaining all the attributes of Divinity in a latent state. This would be to admit an irreducible duality which would withdraw Him from the normal conditions of human life. His obedience would become illusory, and His example would be without application to our race. No ; when the Word became flesh, He humbled Himself; He put ofl* His glory : being " rich, He became poor ; and was made in all points like as we are, only without sin;" that He might pass through the moral conflict, with all the perils of free- dom. He is the Son of God, who has voluntarily abased Himself; and this humiliation is the beginning, as it is the condition, of His sacrifice. Of His divinity He retained PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS. zSq that which constitutes, in a manner, its moral essence ; and He is not the less man on that account, because man is only complete in God. Unless we would fall into a docetism which would make a phantom of Christ, and an illusion of the Gospel, we must needs admit, in all its import and with all its mystery, this humiliation of the Word, — ^a truth far too much lost sight of by the theological school of the fourth century. In the preceding age, in the midst of hesi- tations and uncertainties of formula, there never ceased to be faith in Christ as truly man ; there was no recourse to the dogma of the two natures, but a faithful adherence to the beliefs of apostolic times, too living and too profound to be lost in such metaphysical distinctions. '' Homo foetus estf** said Irenaeus, ^*ut nos assue/aceret fieri Dei.*' Thus, then, the Christ whose life we are about to trace, is not that strange Messiah who possesses, as God, omnis- cience and omnipotence ; while, as man. His knowledge and power are limited. We believe in a Christ who has become truly like unto us ; who was subject to the conditions of progress and the gradual development of human life ; and who was " obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.*' From such a point of view, the Gospel is living and human; it ceases to resemble a Byzantine painting, stiff and motion- less in its frame of gold, with all individual expression merged in conventional colouring. ** It behoved Him," says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ** to be made in all points like unto His brethren, that He might be a merci- ful and faithful high priest ... for in that He Him- self hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted."* * Hebrews ii. 17, i3. BOOK SECOND, $re))aration of Jeisue for f^iis astorH. GENERAL CHARACTER OF HIS PUBLIC MINISTRY. CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD OF JESUS. I. Birth of Jesus Christ, — ^Year of Rome, 750. /^N the eve of a great religious event, souls are stirred ^-^ by strange presentiments. It is thus that, in Judaea — bowed down and groaning under the Idumsean Herod — ^the hope of Messiah manifests itself everywhere with singular vitality. While the mass of the nation is given up to ardent visions of vengeance and gloiy, a purer faith is found in all ranks of the people, and under the most various conditions. Voices which wake echoes in all parts of the country, declare with confidence that the time of fulfilment is at hand ; they are heard at Jerusalem,* under the shadow of the temple, close to those schools in which religion is nothing more than a barren science ; they reverberate in Samaria, where men talk together of the prophet like unto Moses, promised in Deuteronomy.f Judging from the success of the early ministry of John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ in Galilee, these expectations appear to have been very general in that province, which was called disdainfully '* Galilee of the * See Luke ii. 25. f John iv. 19 ; Deuteronomy xviii. 18. PREPARATION OF JBSUJ FOR HIS WORK. XQI Gentiles,"* because it had been always less strictly closed against foreigners than the other parts of Palestine.f Not from this province came illustrious rabbis and men of power; it was far removed from all that agitated Jerusalem, but, for that veiy reason, it was more accessible to enlarged ideas. Far from offering to its inhabitants an asylum of exceptional tranquillity, this province had been the theatre of great political and religious agitation. It was on the shores of the Lake of Gennesareth, under the humble roof of poor ignorant fishermen, that the expectation of Messiah had been preserved in greatest purity. There the voice of ancient prophets was not drowned in that of doctors of Pharisaic tradition ; it retained its power in the midst of that grand serenity of nature ; there the piety of mothers kindled that of sons ; there grew up those who were to become, subse- quently, St. Peter and St. John. The tremor of expectation was communicated even to the pagan world, especially in the countries bordering on Judaea. { As the proximity of an unknown land is ascertained by breezes which have swept across it, so was there, mingling with the atmosphere of the times, a breath from the new shores, which the human soul was approaching. To aspiration there came soon a response of positive reve- lation. For many centuries no new prophet had arisen ; hence there was a bitter consciousness of decline in the midst of that rigid orthodoxy and faithful observance of the law, on which men so prided themselves at Jerusalem. In vain might Herod lavish, on the building of the temple, all the resources of an advanced civilisation ; marble and gold could not make that other than an empty monument, in wliich the presence of God was no more revealed. " The dew of blessing falls not on us, and our fruits are tasteless,'* " Matthew iv. 15. f Johephus speaks of the number of Greeks who dwelt there 0* Vita," 12). X See Matthew ii. i. Zga BOOK SECOND. exclaimed Rabbi Simeon, the son Gamaliel.* The heavens must needs open again to fertilise the parched ground, and to inaugurate a new era of moral fruitfulness. It was in the temple that the long silence of the voice Divine was at length broken. Among the pious Jews of those times was a priest of the name of Zacharias, of the family of Abia, one of those four and twenty sacerdotal courses instituted by David to attend to the worship of God by rotation during one weelcf Living in retirement, he, with his wife Elizabeth, had kept the faith of the ancient days ; and being childless, he had known the sharpest trial that could visit a believing Israelite, who looked upon each new-bom infant as the possible child of promise. The holy city and the temple had preserved for him their sacred character ; thus, when his turn came to officiate for the people, his prayers ascended to heaven with the incense that he burnt before the altar, and bore with it a yearning sigh for the deliverance of Israel. " Just as the muse visits only the poet, so does inspiration descend only into the heart prepared for it.*' This beautiful sa3ring finds confirmation in the story of Zacharias. As he was fulfilling his office, he was honoured with a celestial vision. The angel Gabriel appeared to him on the right side of the altar ; he told him that his aged wife should be no longer barren, and that this second Sarah should give to the world a son consecrated 6s ^Si^Xa- T^evaoM C)s ix yipoit tfrraj AajSid (*• Hegesippus ap. Euseb. H. E." iii, 20). It is, then, less absurd to admit the descent of Christ from David than would appear from the negation of it by M. Renan and the sarcasia of Strauss. PRBPARATION OB JBSUS FOR HIS WORK. 195 Gospel limner has sketched in a few outlines, so true and tender that Christian art has never heen weary of reproducing it on its canvas. Mary is not a sort of divinity bom of clouds. She is a true daughter of earth, and the humanity represented in her is that feeble, fallible, suffering thing we know so well, only she represents it in most touching humility and most assured faith. In this virgin heart the long-drawn aspiration of mankind — ^uttered as a deep plaint among the noblest of the heathen, as a glorious oracle in Hebrew pro- phecy— ^becomes the pure and perfect expression of the desire after salvation. Mary appears on the old stem of Judaism like the flower on the tree, marking the season of maturity. Let us encircle her with no other halo than that glorious hope, which flashes out in her song after the annunciation, and leave unlifted that veil of heavenly modesty in which she enwraps herself when she learns her high destiny, and of which she is never divested. Poetry has no more beautiful creation than the scene of the annunciation. Far are we from thence concluding the relation to be a myth. Why treat as chimerical all which passes the limit of vulgar prose ? May we not suppose the ideal and. the real meeting in the divine plan ? As Neander has said, when Jesus Christ comes into the world, it is the divine ideal becoming a human reality. Without entering upon any dogmatic controversy, we will content ourselves with establishing that the miraculous con- ception of Jesus (everywhere implied in the New Testament, even where it is not formally stated), is an essential part of Christian doctrine.* He who is to be the head of a new race * The Gospel of the childhood in Matthew and Luke suffices to estab- lish the fundamental agreement between the synoptics and the fourth Gospel as to the divine nature of Messiah. St. Paul implies everywhere the miraculous conception ; how otherwise explain Phil. ii. 7, 8 ; Col. i. 15, 16 ? It is objected that Joseph is spoken of more than once in our Gospels as the father of Jesus Christ (Luke iv. 22; John i. 45 ; vi. 42). But this assertion is always put into the mouth of the Jews as a sign of unbelief or of contempt, and it is even so in the case of Nathanael. It doubtless expressed the current opinion about Jesus. Luke himself removes the difficulty, when he says in his genealogy that Jesus was 196 BOOK SBCOND* which is to be at once divine and human — the realisation, that is to say, of its primitive type — cannot be simply one of the links of the long chain of natural generations, all tainted with the evil which has, as it were, become incorporated in a fallen race. It is impossible that He should save humanity, if He has to say with David, ** I was conceived in sin." We must make, as it were, a new beginning ; and the second Adam cannot destroy the work of the first, except on con- dition that He be not of his descent. He must be bom of a woman, and assume a truly human nature ; but it is equally essential that the active cause of his earthly being be not a corrupt humanity, but the divine and creative principle. When the angel Gabriel, having announced the miraculous conception to Mary with that sublime chastity which belongs only to a pure spirit, adds these words, << Therefore that holy thing which shall be bom of thee shall be called the Son of God," he gives us the true commentary on the grand saying of John, ** The Word was made flesh." As to expla- nations of this mystery, we can offer none, but such as is contained in the words, ''With God nothing is impossible;" this will suffice for every* believer in the omnipotent mercy, which is the one foundation of the supematural. The holy tremor of Mary, her simple and confiding accept- ance of her amazing destiny, her journey to the hill country of Judaea, to mingle her joy with that of her cousin Elizabeth, the first interview, in which the two mothers confide to each other their hopes — ^these features of Luke's narrative are fresh in every memory. The song of the virgin, as indeed all the utterances of the same nature preserved in the Gospels, retains the character of the poetry of the old Testament : wc cupposed to be the ton of Joseph: ^,C)s ivofUtero.vl^'lwr^ (Luke 111.23). Objection t8 also taken to Mary*8 uneasiness when the child remained behind in the temple (Luke ii. 46). But this is to forget the reality of His humanity. As to the unbelief of His neighbours, it is easily explained, if we consider how much less striking is continuous moral ekvatioo *ian that which ii sudden and exceptional. i«BB PREPARATION OP JESUS FOR HIS WORE. 1 97 find in it both the form and spirit of the old sacred lyric, Hebrew prophecy, in its last manifestation, is like Elizabeth, who feels the babe leap in her bosom so soon as she sees the mother of the Lord. The future about to be revealed quivers, as it were, beneath the tissue of pregnant S3rmbols, like a bud ready to burst. Mary's whole nature flows out in the "Magnificat," full of fervent gratitude and deep humility : — " My 8oal doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden : For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For He that is mighty hath magnified me ; and holy is His name. And His mercy is on them that fear Him, from generation to gene- ration. He hath showed strength with His arm ; He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things ; and the rich He hath sent empty away." These words are like a foreshadowing of the first of the beatitudes : '' Blessed are the poor in spirit." Nothing can better show that we have reached the point of contact be- tween God and man, than the fact that the last utterance of the old covenant is the opening word of the Gospel. None of all the great prophets has expressed a firmer hope of Messiah than this daughter of Abraham, recalling, on the eve of its actual accomplishment, the first of the promises made to the father of her people. '* He hath holpen His servant Israel, In remembrance of His mercy ; As He spake to our fathers, To Abraham, and to his seed for ever." Hardly had the virgin returned to her native town, when Elizabeth brought into the world the child so long waited for, who was to be John the Baptist. Zacharias recovered his speech ; the breath of inspiration touched the lips which had been mute for so many months. As if the better to mark the religious signihcance of this birth, the father is merged m the prophet. He regards it, first of all, as the igS BOOK SECOND. precarsive sign of the great event which was about to be accomplished for the salvation of the world. His horizon is not wider than that of his contemporaries. He rejoices in the thought that Israel shall be " delivered from the hand of her enemies; "* but this deliverance will be a woxic of mercy; its result will be the re-establishment of holiness and right- eousness, ♦* and the remission of sins/'t It is only after having thus first spoken of Messiah, that Zacharias describes in these beautiful words the mission of his son : '* And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest : for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways."J This prophetic psalm winds up with an image of truest poetry. The coming salvation is represented as " the day- spring from on high," — ^the celestial morning which is to break upon the darkness of the world. Mary was the betrothed of Joseph : the form of the latter is but faintly outlined in the Gospel history. Nothing is less like the methods of fable, than the account of his scru- ples when he learns the condition of his future wife. Ap- prised in a dream of the mystery which he had taken for her shame, he does not hesitate to many Mary, for he knows that the child she bears shall " saVe his people from their sins.*' He was awaiting the event when an unforeseen circumstance led him to the little town of Bethlehem, whence originally he came. King Herod was reaching the term of his long career, in which his successes were numbered by his crimes. The old despot owed his throne only to the favour of Augustus ; thus he showed himself as servile towards Rome as he was implacable to the Jews ; it was not likely, at a moment when his failing powers warned him that he must make his last stroke of policy, by assuring his power to his children, that he would refuse to lend himself to any desire or whim of his all-powerful protector. Now Augustus had begun just • Luke i. 71. + Ch. i. 74, 75. { Ch. i. 76. 77. PREPARATION OP JBSUS PdR HIS WORK. IQQ at this time to take a census of his empire-; he wished to obtain an exact statement of the resources of each province, according to positive evidence; he included in this enrolment the allied kingdoms, which were in reality dependent on his authority ; only, according to the ancient and wise policy of Rome, he permitted a compliance in form of the usages of the country. Nothing then need prevent our supposing a first census in Judsea, made conformably to the Jewish customs, which took account rather of a man's birthplace than of his residence. Herod was not the man to refuse Augustus a satisfaction so unimportant as this, or to assert the independence of Judaea ; it is well known how ready he ever was to sacrifice such considerations, when his own interests were concerned. This first census preceded the more general one which took place some years later under Cyrenius, who was the governor after S3rria had been re- duced to a Roman province.* It was thus a political measure, * We quote the much controverted text of Luke, according to the ** Codex Sinaiticus : ** a^ri Aroypa^ iyhtro irpdmi ^^/lorcdorrof, T^ Zvplas Ku/niphv. It is impossible not to observe the place oc- cupied bv the word rpCffrny in the oldest of the manuscripts. It is not, as in subsequent texts, separated from the genitive IfyefMndortos, but immediately precedes it ; it is, then, very probable that, notwithstanding the exceptional hardness of the phrase, it governs the words which follow it, so that we may strictly translate thus : " This census took place beforg Cyrenius was ^vemor of Syria." Without enumerating the various examples of similar phraseology which may be found in Greek literature (see Tholuck, " GlaubwGrdigkeit,*' p. i8i), we will con- fine ourselves to recalling the words of John the Baptist : rp&rbt fnov fy, " He was before me" (John i. x^ ). Evident^ rpwros here governs the genitive. If this translation is admitted, it removes the great difficulty presented by any other version; for the general census pre- sided over by Cyrenius did not take place till ten years later. I can see, on the other hand, no difficulty in supposing that Herod may have con • sented to meet the wishes of Augustus. It is certain that Augustus was constantly occupied with the thought of adjusting the balance of his empire, and the allied kingdoms dependent on it (Suetonius, " Octavius." c. xxviii.). Savigny, after having shown that from the commencement of the empire there was an endeavour to introduce the census in all the provinces, admits that the mode of takin? the census varied accord- ing to the customs of the countries in which it was made (*' Zeitschrift fur Geschischltich. Rechtwissenschaft," Vol. vi.). There is also a curious passage of Suidas which speaks expressly of a first census made throughout the empire under Augustus (Tholuck, Olaubwurdigkeit, p. n 100 BOOK SECOND. entirely foreign to any religious consideration, which led Joseph and Mary to the city of David, The Jewish law laid no obligation on a woman to undertake such a journey, for the writing of her name was enough ; but who can wonder at the young wife, situated like Mary, accompanying her protector ? Besides, she was not ignorant of the prophecy which pointed out Bethlehem as the city of Messiah. From Nazareth to Bethlehem is about four days* journey, especially for a poor family without any vehicle at command, and tread- ing on foot the dusty roads of Palestine. After passing the plain of Jezreel and smiling Samaria, the hill countcy of Judsea, stony, and often arid, has to be traversed. Joseph and Mary travelled like poor pilgrims. Thus, on their arrival 294). Herod made the census willingly, not as a subject, but as a royal ally ; that is, in the form appropriate to the customs of his kingdom. Thus all objections are removed. A novel attempt at explanation has met with great success. Zumpt, in his book, entitled " De Sjrria Romana provincia ab C. Aug., ad T. Vespas." (1854), endeavours to show that Quirinius was twice governor of Syria. Tacitus records that Quirinius crushed the nation of the Homonadensians in Cilicia, after his elevation to the consulate and before he had been sent out as a guide to C. Caesar, in his expedition into Armenia (** Annals," iii. 48). His consulate dates from the year of Rome, 742, and his expedition into Armenia about 756. He defeated the Homonadensians ^ then, in this interval ; but he could only have done it as governor of Sjrria, for Cilicia was then a de- pendency of that province. Now the names of the governors of Syria being known up to the year 720-51 B.C., his entry upon office is brought up to that year. It follows that he must have been for the first time go- vernor of Syria in the year of Rome, 750, the actual date of the birth of Jesus Christ. Mommsen arrives at the same result by his reading of the medsd found at Tivoli, and struck in honour of a consul, the conqueror of a valiant nation, twice governor of Syria, and who sur- vived Augustus. Now these designations apply only to Quirinius, conqueror of the Hopumadensians, and the only one of the legates of Syria who lived under Tiberius. Mommsen, on the same ground as Zumpt, places the first governorship of Quirinius on the verge of the year 751. This result is assuredly of great interest. The diffi- culty, however, still remains, that in 750 Judsea was not a Roman pro- vince. (See Mommsen's ** Notes on the Monuments of Ancyra.'* The entire debate has just been reopened by the learned pamphlet of M. Henri Lutteroth, entitled "Le Recensement de Quirinius** (Paris, 1865). Rejecting the solution which we have accepted, and which is due to Herwart, the author proposes to connect Luke i. 80 with Luke ii. I. ** The child,*' says the Evangelist, speaking of John the Baptist, ** grew and waxed strong in spirit, and was m the desert till the time of bis showing to Israel.*' M. Lutteroth understands by this " showing to PRSPARATION OP JESUS FOR HIS WORK. lOt at Bethlehem, they met with n6 eager reception; and when they knocked at the door of a humble inn, there was no room for them, as Luke tells us in his simple, touching words. Mary found only a stable for her shelter ; and there, not in a cave, as says the legend, the Redeemer was bom.* ** Not only," says Bossuet, " does He seek no human splendours, but to show how little He accounts of such. He places Himself at the farthest extreme from them all. Hardly can he find a spot lowly enough to be His birth-place ; He meets with a half-fallen stable, and into this He de- scends. He accepts all that men shun, all that they fear, all that they despise, all which repels their senses, in order to show how vain and imaginary are to Him all the glories of the world."t Si ignobiliSf si inglorius^ si inhonorabilis, Israel" the first participation of John the Baptist in the passover feast, which took place with proung Jews at twelve years of age. The follow- ing verse (Luke ii. i) gives us the precise date of that event, hy pointing to the census under uyrenius. Thus the edict of Augustus was published at the time when John celebrated his majority. Our principal objection to this explanation arises from the meanmg which M. Lutteroth attaches to Luke li. 6. The evangelist, after connecting the census under Cjrrenius with the journey of Joseph and Maiy to Bethlehem, adds, '* And so it was that while they were there the days were accomplished that fhe should be delivered." '* Eypirero Si iv r^ etvai atno^ ixei iwkftadricaif al ii/Uptu roO T€K€ty aMjy.'* It appears to us evident that the second fact is closely connected with the first. M. Lutteroth is obliged to dissever them entirely ; for, according to his theory, the birth of Jesus Christ took place twelve years before. He is compelled to supplement Luke's text thus : " It was there they were also when the time came that she should be delivered. It seems to me impossible to admit that the capital event of the Gospels and of history should be thus casually mentioned, and linked as an episode to a fact so insignificant as the first participation of John the Baptist in the passover. * M. Renan denies, without any proof, the birth of Jesus at Bethle- hem (" Vie de J^us," p. zy). Strauss does the same. There is no real contradiction in the Gospel narrative. If Matthew says nothing of Nazareth, as the habitual residence of Joseph and Mary, he does not in* validate the evidence of Luke. It is objected, that on the return from ^gyp^f Joseph and Mary do not think of first going to Nazareth (Matt, ii. 2i). Nothing prevents our supposing that after jfche memorable events which had been accomplished at Bethlehem, their first intention may have been to settle there. Against the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem is brought forward also John vii. 41, 4a. But this passage g^ves the opinion of the ignorant multitude, not that of the evangelist. f Bosfluet, " First Sermon on the Nativity <» Jesus Christ. a03 BOOK SECOND. mens erit Christus"* exclaims TertuUian, in the contem- plation of 80 much glory in so much abasement. This great event, the most momentous in the history (rf the world — since it divides it into its two great parts, and is the hidden pole around which gravitate all humande^tinieb •-—took place as unheeded a& the most obscure.f No one marked it, except the angels in heaven, and some shepherds who were keeping their flocks on one of the hills which surround Bethlehem. It was at a season of the year when * Tertullian, " Contra Marcionem,*' iii. 17. f The date of the birth of Jesus Christ should be assigned, not to the year of Rome, 754, marked by the ordinary era, but to the year 750 ; and that for the following reasons : — ^First, it is clear that Jesus Christ was born before the death of Herod (Matt. ii. i). Now, according to Josephus ("Ant.** zvii. 8, § z; **De Bell. Jud.*' i. 53, & 8), Heiod died about the month of Nisan, 750. This may be inferred, also, from the eclipse of the moon which, according to Josephus, took place during the nulitoiy insurrection which preceded his death by a few months. Now Kepler has calculated that this eclipse must have happened in the year 750 ("Le R^censement de Quirmius," par Lutteroth, p. 5). Secondry, kepler also assigns to the year 748 the sidereal conjunction which led to the ioumey of the Magi. We shall recur presently to the explanation of this phenomenon. Now, according to Matthew ii. x6, we see that this ought to have occurred two years before the birth of Jesus Christ, because Herod caused to be put to death all the children of that age, as contemporaries of Messiah ; we are thus brought to the year 750 for the birth of Jesus. Thirdly, we shall see, farther on, that the baptism of Jesus Christ took place in the year 780, according to Luke iii. 21 ; now He was thirty years of age at this period. The approximate expression, (^«l, only refers to months, and not to years. This date again gives us 750 as the year of His birth. After the year, it has been attempted to determine the month ; a very ingenious calculation has been made to fix the date of the vision of Zacharias, by searching out the time of the year when the priestly course of Abia, to which he belonged, com- menced its service in the temple. Now the course of Abia should begin its office in the month of October, if it is true, as the Talmud has it, that the order of Jajarib was in office on the gth of the month Ab, the day when the second temple was destroyed. We must reckon a year and three months from October, 748, to the birth of Christ, since the an- nunciation took place in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy. In any case, Herod died in the month of Nisan. Jesus Christ was certainly born before his death. The same result is reached in a surer way than the necessarily hypothetical calculation founded on the order of the priests* service. The presentation in the temple was before the month of Nisan, the date of Herod*s death. Now it took place iotty days after the birth of Jesus. This brings us precisely to the month of February, or the end of January. (See Wieseler, *« Chronologische Synopt. der vicr Evang.," pp. 49 — 150.) PREPARATION OP JESUS VOR HIS WORK. 203 the Boftened temperature sometimes made it needless to lead the sheep into the city at evening time. It was, doubtless, one of those beautiful oriental nights when the heavens proclaimed nothing but mercy. These simple men were chosen as the first to receive tilie good tidings of great joy, because they were waiting for it. Everything in those fields, where the young David, like themselves, had fed his flock, reminded them of the promise made to his race, and they, as well as the scribes at Jerusalem, had doubtless read the mysterious oracle, which declared that the very ground they were treading should be the cradle of Messiah. Sud- denly the startled air resounds with a mysterious choir; they hear angelic voices, and divine words proclaim in their ears-* " Glory to God in the highest ; Peace on earth, good-wiU toward men." The shepherds believed the things which were spoken ; simple, artless men they were, who had not learnt in the schools at Jerusalem to admit as possible mercy only that which a Pharisee could comprehend. They deemed it not strange — and we are at one with them — ^that angels, man*s elder brothers, dwellers in a purer region, where evil had not come, should celebrate with their sweetest songs such an event as the birth of the Redeemer. Bethlehem is built on a little hill ; it is surrounded with lesser hills, which seem to rise in regular gradations, and do not shut in the horizon. Beyond these graduated heights, a soft and yet striking landscape stretches away to the mountains of Moab and the steppes of the Dead Sea. The shepherds were encamped on one of those lovely meadows, planted with olive and fig trees, which may still be seen ; from thence they set out in haste to the town, and in a steep and narrow street they found the holy child wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger. They know His glory, and they see His humiliation. In lowly adoration they fall at His feet. These poor men, rich in faith and love, are the first retinue of the King of souls, as the cradle ft04 BOOK SECOND. is His first throne. No honour could better become Hinl, nothing could better show over what kingdom He came to reign. "Oh, with what majesty does He appear to the spirit 1 '* exclaims Pascal. Mary looked on, adoring with trembling so much greatness in so much frailty; she made of all these memories a sacred treasure, which she " kept in her heart," * to transmit them unbroken to the Church. II. The Childhood of Jesus. None of the observances commanded in the law was neg- lected for the child Jesus. Assuredly a fictitious history would not have admitted rites which might seem to deny His original purity, and which were only the signs of His complete incorporation with His people and mankind. Eight days after His birth He was circumcised, and so- lemnly received that name of Jesus which found in Him alone its full signification. On the fortieth day, after the legal purification of the mother, Joseph and Mary brought Him into the temple, to present the offering which redeemed from the priesthood every first-born male child of Israel.t The rich offered a lamb; the poor, two turtledoves. This was the sacrifice of the family of Joseph the carpenter. But that great contrast of humbleness and glory which per- vades the whole life of Christ appears again in this hour. Hardly is the child borne across the threshold of the temple, when He is hailed by a prophetic voice. The aged Simeon declares that he is now ready to depart in peace, since on his closing eyes has shone the light which is to lighten all nations.^ Inspiration bears him higher still, and he foretells at what a price this salvation of the world will be purchased. This feeble new-born child shall divide mankind, and the thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed. He is set apart for many sorrows, and the soul of Mary His mother shall be pierced through with a sword. § * Luke ii. 19. f Levit. xii. 4—6. X Luke ii. 31, 32. $ Ch. ii. 35. PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORE. 205 The double prophecy of Simeon receives a speedy confir- mation after the return of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, where it would seem they then wished to fix their abode. While the best representatives of the heathen world are bringing Him their homage, the life of the child is menaced by the king who is seated on the throne of David. His earthly career opens under this ray of glory and this glare of hate. A sidereal phenomenon, which consisted in the conjunc- tion of three planets, with which might, perhaps, be asso- ciated the appearance of one of those passing stars which astronomers have marked from time to time, had drawn some devotees of the religion of Zoroaster from the far East to Palestine. Clearly, the precursive sign of the Messiah must first have arisen in their hearts, or they would not have sought it in the heavens ; if this great hope had not been illuminating their dim anticipations, they would not have connected it with a natural appearance which had in itself no religious significance. We have already shown that the religion of Persia was more access- ible than any other eastern superstition to the idea of a Messiah ; human life was not, in its creed, as in the panthe- ism of India, an evil dream, which man must seek to shake off as speedily as possible, either by asceticism or annihila- tion; it represented life as a real combat between beneficent and maleficent powers; it recognised the intervention of superior beings in our destiny, to effect our deliverance ; it believed in godlike heroes, the servants or representatives of Ormuz. Parseeism had departed farther and farther from the fatalistic dualism with which it started; it had become purified by its contact with Judaism since the exile in Babylon. The dispersion of the Jews throughout the East had augmented their influence. There is nothing, improbable in the supposition that men like the Magi, be-, longing to the dite of their nation, may have had know- 206 BOOK SECOND. ledge of some of the oracles of the Old Testament. Their aspirations were confirmed by what they learnt of the Messiah looked for in Judaea. In this attitude of heart and mind, a sidereal phenomenon, which we know to have actually taken place two years before the birth of Christ, came to animate their hopes. Doubtless they still shared the superstitions of the ancient East as to the influence of stars, and sought to read the future in the vault of night. But they were sincere seekers after the true God, and He would be found of them. The sidereal appearance which led to the. journey of the Mag^ was no miracle, else it would have aroused a universal astonishment, of which some trace would have been pre- served by the historians of the time. Persian savans have confirmed it by their observations. There is, therefore, no reason for supposing the phenomenon to be other than the conjunction which, according to Kepler, took place about this period.* The Magi bent their steps towards Judaea, probably from a previous acquaintance with Jewish pro- phecies, or from a distant echo which had reached them, to the effect that Messiah was to be bom in that country. Arrived at Jerusalem, they are compelled to inquire where is the town in which He is expected. The reappearance of the star over Bethlehem confirms the exact indications * Kepler arrives at this result in the following manner : At the dose of the year 1603 (Dec. 17th), he noted the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, completed oy Mars in the following spring; in the autumn of the same year, a celestial body, till then unknown, appeared in the neigh- bourhood of Jupiter and Saturn, to the S.E. of Scorpio; it ceased to be visible in March, 1606. Kepler was anxious to ascertain whether a similar phenomenon might not have occurred about the time of the birth of Chnst. His calculation brought him to the conclusion that such a conjunction had occurred in the year 748. He supposed that a celestial body of the nature of that which he had observed might have appeared at the same date. Now, by a very remark* able coincidence, the chronological tables of China show that a star which was only visible for seventy days was noted in the year 748 (Wieseler, p. 64). It is true that Jesus Christ was not born till 750, out the Gospel text shows clearly that the star must have appeared two years previously, since Herod, after having inquired exactly what time the star appeared, had all the children of that age put to death. 'H/c(>^/5(iv< rd^ X^lyof ToO ^aiyofUvov dor^^os (Matt. ii. 7). PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. 207 givQD tbem. Nbw a star could not stand over a house ; its shining could not be thus concentrated, on one point. But it is quite possible that, after being for a time hidden, it might reappear at the very moment in which a fixed spot is reached. The Gospel narrative uses popular language, as when it speaks of the rising and setting of the sun, and makes no pretence to scientific exactness in the description of natural appearances. Thus the Magi were led into Judaea primarily by their holy aspirations. What manner of child shall this be who attracts so far pilgrims from a strange and heathen land ? The time is come when national barriers are about to be thrown down ; more than a mere son of David is here, and a kingdom greater than that of Solomon is at hand.* The Magi, having been warned in a vision, that Herod is only awaiting their tidings to put the Holy Child to death, return privately to their own country: the king, in his wrath, commands the massacre of all the male children of two years old and under in the territory of Bethlehem. Such a crime has been considered improbable, and the silence of Josephus has been urged against it, as if the murder of a handful of children in a little town might not be lost in the midst of all the atrocities which stained especially the latter years of the life of Herod. Assuredly, he who had immolated a cherished wife, a brother, and three sons to his jealous suspicions, and who ordered a general massacre for the day of his funeral, so that his body should not be borne to the earth in the midst of uni- versal rejoicing, — such a monster would not recoil from a measure so insignificant. in his eyes, when the object was to prevent a dangerous explosion of religious fanaticism. * Stranss (p. 373) does not fail to give a mythical origin to the star of the Mag|i, referring it to the star hy which Balaam represents the coming of Messiah (Numb. xxiv. 17). But there is one great difficulty in this interpretation ; namely, that what is pointed out in the oracle of Balaam is not a precursive sign of Messiah, but Messiah Himself. This does away with all analogy between the text brought forward and that of Matthew. 208 BOOK SBCOMDt What recks he of the weeping of mothers ? A little earth soon stifles that ; but it goes up — ^a terrible cry — ^to heaven, '* In Rama was there a voice heard," says the evangelist, quoting from Jeremiah ; '* Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."* This pathetic personification of 'the unhappy city is better understood when one sees at its gates the tomb of the wife of Jacob : the name of Rachel was thus closely linked with Bethlehem, t Joseph and Mary had fled into Egypt, in consequence of a dream in which they had been warned of God of the peril that threatened their child. They remained there only a short time, for Herod died a few weeks after their flight, in the spring of the year of Rome, 750. Joseph, on his return, left Bethlehem for ever ; he feared that the direct • Matt. ii. x8. f We find in the literature of the Talmud a significant confirmation of the historical character of the Gospel of the cnildhood ; in fact, we find the rabbis borrowing from the first chapter of Matthew and Luke their most characteristic traits to apply to the future Messiah, which they would not have done if the evangelical tradition had not acquired a great ascendency. In this respect the following passage from the Sohar is significant : Revelabitur Messias in terra GalikEa, ei stella quadam in plagd orientali exisUns, absorbsbit seftem sellas, quando rtvela" biiur Messias. We read elsewhere : Ortetur e plaga orientali sUlla quadam (Gfrcerer, ii. 358). A proof that this allusion to the star which was to precede Messiah goes back to a date much more ancient than the book of Sohar is, that the famous agitator Bar Cocheba, who led the rebellion of the Jews under Trajan, was called the Son of the Star. Rabbinical literature has also preserved, in its manner, the trace of the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. It makes Pharaoh issue a decree answering exactly to that of Herod, with reference to the Israel- Itish children of the time of Moses. Now Moses was more and more re- earded as the type of Messiah. We confine ourselves to quoting the following passage: Dixerunt magi ad Pharaonem; Nactus est puer qui edncet Israelitas ex Mgypto. Tunc cogitavit Pharao in cords suOf et dixit ut abjicerent omnes natos masculos in fluvium (Gfrcerer, "• 354)- Bvidently there is here a modification of the original histoiy, based on the story of Matthew; for the prevision of the part of Moses as the deliverer of Israel is a feature foreign to Exodus, and borrowed from the Gospel. It is certam that at the close of the first century the fourth book of Esdras shows a marked tendency to assign to Messiah a supernatural origin, which reminds us of the first chapters of Matthew and Luke. PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. 70y heir of Herod might show the same animus as his father* He settled in Galilee, in the town of Nazareth, which had heen his abode before the great events of that memo- rable year had made him desirous of dwelling in the city of David.* Apocryphal literature has evinced a great predi- lection for this period of the history of Jesus, just because it has been left in the shade by the Gospel. f We shall imitate the sacred reserve. It is certain that the childhood of Christ forms no exception to the law of slow and gradual progress. "The child," says Luke, "grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.'*^ Thus did Jesus pass through the obscure period in which thought and consciousness are yet dormant ; on the knees of His mother He learned to speak, and the divine treasures hidden within were not at once disclosed. Evil alone had no growth within Him ; nothing tarnished the exquisite purity of His soul. He never for an instant ceased to be one with His Father ; His heart opened as spontaneously to the life divine, as His lungs breathed the vital air* Then, as He grew, and intelligence opened, He became more and more conscious of the peculiar relation which united Him to God. Externally, nothing seems to have distinguished Him from other children, at least in the eyes of those who did not, like Mary, lift the veil of humility which concealed His inner • Whatever Schleiennacher may say (" Leben Jesu," p. 75), the narra- tives of Matthew and Luke can harmonise, for there is no impossibility in supposing that the presentation in the temple took place before the adoration of the Ma(p and the flight into Egypt. f The quotation made by Matthew from Hosea zi. x, *' I have called my Son out of Egypt" (ch. ii. 15, 16), applying it to the return of the child Jesus into luH^a, is an example of the freedom with which he searches the Old Tesc^roent to find everywhere types and predictions of Messiah; for it is certain that the prophet had only reference, in that text, to a past event — the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt — and not to a future event relating to Christ. We find a still more strik- ing instance of this method of quotation in Matt. ii. 23. It is impossible to find in the Old Testament a text in which the w*rd Nazarens is ap- plied to Messiah. I Luke ii. 40. 2XO BOOK SECOND. life. If it had been otherwise, it would be impossible to explain the persistent unbelief of His kinsfolk and neigh- bours. He did not assume the prophetic, nor ever assert a precocious independence. As a child. He perfectly ful- filled the duties of His age, which may be summed up in submission to the heads of the family. ** Thus," 8a3rs Irenaeus, " He sanctified childhood by passing through it.** There is every reason to suppose that He grew up in the workshop of Joseph, and laboured with His own hands. If He attended the elementary schools in which the young Jews were initiated into holy studies. He kept aloof from those of the rabbis : to frequent these He must have quitted 'Nazareth ; and what would they have taught Him ? What had He to do with that scholasticism, the elaborate frame- work of which He was to destroy with a breath? His teaching shows how deeply He was versed in the sacred literature of His people; there He found, as it were, His spiritual patrimony ; the divine words were the food of His soul, and reached to its very depths. The Boh and lovely scenes of nature which surrounded Him were also a holy book, in which He read the name of His Father; He grasped in all its depth the harmony which exists between the revelations of earth and heaven. Nazareth is one of the sweetest sites in Palestine. St. Jerome rightly calls it the flower of Galilee, and compares it to a rose opening its corolla. It does not command a landscape like Beth- lehem ; the girdle of hills which encloses it makes it a calm retreat, the silence of which is, still in our day, broken by the hammer and chisel of the artisan. The child Jesus grew up in the midst of a thoroughly simple life, in which a soul like His might best develop its harmonies. He had only to climb the surrounding heights to contemplate one of the finest landscapes of the Holy Land. At His feet lay the plain of Jezreel, tapestried with myriads of flowers, each one more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. Its boundaries were Tabor and Carmel, whence echoed the PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. IKXf voice of Elijah ; Lebanon confronted Carmel, and the chain of Hermon joined its snowy summits to the mountains of Moab, while afar off glimmered the Great Sea, which, out- lying all national barriers, seemed to open to Jesus that world which He came to save. Living in communion with Nature, He learned to know her well. From her He gathered those expressive illustrations which He afterwards scattered broadcast over His discourses, and which make Hie parables such fresh and living pictures. Just as the plant does not open to the sun, till it has cast itsroo^s into the soil to a depth not measured by the eye, so Jesus, by secret and intense prayer, drew the sap and life of His soul from the very bosom of God. Some favouring circumstance was all that was needed to strike from Him, before the eyes of all, the spark divine. This was afforded by the journey to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast, at the age when the young Jews began to take part publicly in the religious life of their people. This solemn visit to the temple filled the soul of Jesus with emotion not to be described : under the symbols, He beheld the divine realities. He felt Himself truly in the house of God, and, perhaps, for the first time became fully conscious of the greatness of His mission ; He com- prehended that He would be called to fulfil those solemn types. When His mother, grieved at His tarrying behind, addressed Him in words of tender reproach, He gave that deep and mysterious reply, " How was it that ye sought me ? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"* His precocious wisdom had been already revealed in an interview with the doctors of the temple. His questions showed such riches of thought and feeling, that the illustrious masters were themselves confounded. The questions of a child are often more embarrassing, by their artless depth, than the arguments of the most consummate dialectician. They go straight to the truth by * Luke ii. 49. 121^ BOOK SECOND. the royal road of simplicity. There was not a whiteheaded rabbi in the schools of the law, who could meet the questions of this child of Nazareth. This scene in the temple was of great moment in the development of Jesus, by revealing Him to Himself. The next eighteen years He passed in the most complete obscurity. We may not seek to penetrate their mystery ; it is enough for us to know that they prepared Him in solitude for His great mission.* He spent them in prayer and a holy life.f * M. Keim has devoted some noble pages to the development of Jesus during this period, in his pamphlet, entitled " Der Geschichtliche Christus Erste Rede." He dwells eloquently on the influence which must have been exerted upon Him by the reading of the prophets and by the scenes of nature. We are not prepared to suppose, with him, that the Pharisees taught Jesus the idea of the kingdom of God founded on righteousness. This idea is the very soul of the Old Testament. The sect of the Pharisees showed Him what were the elements of false devo- tion and of the spurious religion which destroys souls. f The question whether Jesus had any brothers has no religious interest after the decisive text (Matt. i. 25), o6k iyUmirKw wMiv ierely a holy retreat ; it was also the scene of His first combat and His first victoiy. The Redeemer there passed through that great trial of the free- will, without which no moral destiny is complete. Here we are compelled to accept unreservedly the mystery of His utter humiliation. If impeccability is claimed for Him, He is withdrawn from the true conditions of earthly life. His humanity remains only an illusion, a transparent veil through which appears His impassible divinity. Being no more like unto us. He is no more ours. To the moving drama of a moral conflict succeeds I know not what metaphysical phantas- magoria. He can no longer be spoken of as the subject of temptation or trial. Instead of the head of a new human race, we have only a mental creation worthy of the inven- tions of Gnostics. Let us bring down the Christ from this cold empyrean of theology where He is but a dogma, and say with IrengtuSf Erat hotno cerfans fro fatribus — "He was PREPARATION OF JESUS FOR HIS WORK. 233 truly a man fighting for his home.'* Let us receive that strange and sublime text of the New Testament, ** He learned obedience/** which signifies that from the state of natural and instinctive innocence, He had to raise Himself to a holiness of choice, a perilous transit in which the first Adam fell, but in which the second conquered by the sole arms of faith and prayer, and not by girding on as an impe- netrable panoply His eternal Godhead. The scene of the desert was, in fact, the counterpart of that which transpired more than four thousand years before, in the shades of Eden. Both belong to that mysterious region in which the human mind can enter only by means of majestic S3mibols, which have nevertheless corresponding moral realities. The first father of mankind — bound to his descendants by so close a union, that he in a manner in- cluded them in himself — underwent the great ordeal of free existence in a sojourn of beauty and glory ; the second Adam passed through it in a fearful solitude — image of a world deep-graven with the brand of the fall and of condemnation. Those denuded rocks, that reddened soil scorched by a burn- ing sun, that sulphurous sea stretching like a shroud ovei the accursed cities — all this land of death, mute and motion- less as the grave, formed a fitting scene for the decisive conflict of the Man of sorrows. There is contrast strongly marked in many points between the first and second temp- tation ; it is no more a question of the simple perpetuation of a happy union with God, but of the recovery of this union under the bitter conditions which have resulted from its rupture. It would be taking a narrow view of the moral conflict of the life of Christ to limit it to the forty days spent in the wilderness. In reality. His whole life was a conflict, but its two great battles were fought at the commencement and close of His ministry — in the desert of Judaea and the garden of Gethsemane. * Hebrews ▼• 8. 234 fux>^ BBCoiro. In tlie temptatiOA in the wildemeibs, wt witness the ap- pearance of that nfi3mteriotis being, who is represented in the first book of the Bible, as connected with the history of the fall. Satan, as we hfeive shown, is not the Persian Ahriman^ who represents the element of evil in nature as well as in moral life ; he is a fallen angel, created in light and purity like all God's creatures, but having failed to abide in them.* Doubtless he also fell under the trial of moral freedom, universally imposed on intelligent beings made in the like- ness of God. We know nothing of the nature of this trial, of the manner of his rebellion, nor of the sphere ot which it took place. It is impossible to admit or reject with any certainty the hypothesis so often sustained, that the gigantic wrecks on which the new life of our planet has flourished, give evidence of a tragical history before the human era, in which man was preceded on the earth by beings higher than himself in their origin, who have there- fore fallen lower, and are become the natural and desperate enemies of the race which has succeeded them. We are bound to hold the reality of the existence of devils ; nothing in reason opposes the possibility of moral beings, different from man, more utterly perverted, and endowed with a subtlety of nature which allows them wider iind more rapid action. There are times when the imperceptible barrier which divides us from the invisible world — ^so far from our eyes, so near to our hearts — seems to fall altogether. Such are the great religious crises of humanity ; now there is no crisis comparable to the opening of the era of Christ. We do not think, then, that we are yielding to any superstition, in recognising in the temptation the direct intervention of the chief of those evil spirits, who are the worst enemies of man. v But what form did this intervention assume 7 Evidently the account in our Gospels cannot be taken literally. The * See John viii. 44. PREPARATION 09 JBSVS FOR HIS WORK. 335 mountain whence are visible all the Idngdoms of the world nowhere exists ; we are thtis carried mt once into the sym- bolical. Yet we cannot see in the temptation a mere parable, translated and amplified into popular speech by the disciples of Jesus, the only object of which would have been to deter- mine the true character of His mission as Messiah. This would be to destroy the moral fact, ^ich is, in our view, one of capital importance.* The temptation was real. We mean not that the pure soul of Jesus was for a single instant drawn towards evil, but it was unquestionably solicited by evil from without by means of a vision.t There is no difficulty in supposing visions which in no way suspend moral action. The temptation assumes all the more im- portance, the more it is freed from every lower element. The conflict would be one little worthy of Christ if the gist of it were only the resistance of hunger, abstinence from a presumptuous action, and the refusal of material glory. The question proposed belongs to a far wider sphere ; it is the moral question itself, such as it was presented to the first Adam, such as it presents itself to every free creature. He is directly called to decide if He will fulfil the one supreme • This is Neander*s idea {" Vie de J^sus,'* i., p. 108), who on this point has yielded to the influence of Schleiermacner. The latter was led by his detenninism to suppress the moral conflict in the life of Christ. As to the chronological difficulties which he raises, they are not at all insurmountable. Nothing prevents our supposing that the tempta- tion took place before the last interview with John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan (John i 29). f Calvin himself admitted the possibility of this interpretation ('* Com- ment, sur le N. T." i., p. 121). We will only mention Lange's singular explanation, which supposes that the emissaries of the Sanhedrim, who had interrogated John the Baptist, went into the wilderness to propose to Jesus, to assert Himself as a theocratic Messiah. They thus them- selves played, on this occasion, the part of the tempter, under whose influence they visibly acted (Lange's •• Leben Jesu," i., pp. 195 — 205). This revival of a ridiculous hypothesis of Paulus is not happy. Strauss connects the temptation with the sojourn of Israel in the desert ; he sees in it only a myth, fabricated from the legends of the Old Testament ("Leben Jesu," p. 331). We recommend on this subject the interesting and sensible pa^s devoted to it by M. Lutteroth, in his " Essai d'loter- pr6tation sur Saint Matthieu/' pp. 41 — ^47. 336 BOOK SECOND. law of the moral world, the sum of which is obedience and love, or if He will seek His own satisfaction, His own interest. The question is not stated in a vague and general way ; it is as Messiah that he is tempted ; that which ia aimed at Is the miraculous power which He possesses, or at least with which He is invested by God day by day. This power, employed for selfish and personal ends, might serve first to procure easily for Messiah and for the people, who would receive Him with acclaim, all material advantages* It might then become the means of dazzling men by brilliant signs, which would satisfy their passion for the marvellous ; and after having given possession, it would give gloiy. Nothing could be easier than to obtain by its means power and an earthly kingdom ; for no throne would be exalted enough for a Messiah who should multiply marvels and make plenty and riches spring up beneath his feet. Such was the scope of the temptations which passed before the mind of Jesus, in His vision in the desert after His forty days* fasting. ** If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread."* In other words, Place Thyself above the order of Providence for the satisfaction of Thine hunger. Jesus is carried in spirit into the Holy City, to the pinnacle of the temple, the centre of that theocracy of which He might so easily assume the sceptre. <